Document Description; What It Is; What It Is Not - Nintendo Ultra64 Programmer's Manual

Introduction

Document Description

1
Patterson, D., Hennessy, J.,
Kaufmann Publishers, 1994, ISBN 1-55860-281-X.
16

What It Is

The goal of this document is to enable RSP microcode software
development:
• Explain architectural details of the RSP.
• Explain relevant architectural details of other parts of the RCP.
• Describe the RSP from a microcode programmer's point-of-view.
• Describe the RSP (and interfaces) from the host CPU's
point-of-view.
• Explain the RSP microcode assembly language.
• Explain the RSP software development environment.

What It Is Not

In order to present material at a sufficient level of detail without clutter,
allowing the programmer to "see the forest
have adopted several specific non-goals of this document:
• Basic assembly language programming concepts are not discussed.
The reader is assumed to have a thorough technical background.
• Basic concepts of vector processing architectures are not discussed,
however some specific issues relating to the RSP are discussed
briefly. A good reference for computer architecture which
discusses RISC processors and SIMD (vector) architectures is
"Computer Organization and Design, The Hardware/Software
1
Interface" ,
by Patterson and Hennessy.
• Details of the MIPS Microprocessor Instruction Set Architecture
(ISA) are not presented. The design of the RSP instruction set
"Computer Organization and Design, The Hardware/Software Interface",
and
the trees", so to speak, we
Morgan