Title :
Design tradeoffs and experience with Motorola PowerPC migration tools
Author :
Breternitz, M. ; Manikonda, A. ; Ommerman, M. ; Su, W. ; Thornton, A.
Author_Institution :
RISC Software Div., Motorola Inc., Austin, TX, USA
Abstract :
The Motorola PowerPC migration tools enable the conversion of assembly programs from other architectures to PowerPC. This paper describes the design approach and experience with the tool to translate x86 assembly programs to PowerPC. The key problems of handling 16-bit code, the effects of masking 16-bit operations into 32-bit registers and optimization of condition flags are discussed. The efficiency of translation and the effects of architectural constraints on design tradeoffs are analyzed
Keywords :
computer architecture; microprocessor chips; program assemblers; program interpreters; reduced instruction set computing; 16-bit code; 16-bit operations; 32-bit registers; Motorola PowerPC migration tools; architectural constraints; assembly programs; condition flags; design tradeoffs; x86 assembly programs translation; Application software; Assembly; Computer architecture; Emulation; Operating systems; Optimizing compilers; Read only memory; Reduced instruction set computing; Runtime; Software tools;
Conference_Titel :
Computer Design: VLSI in Computers and Processors, 1996. ICCD '96. Proceedings., 1996 IEEE International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Austin, TX
Print_ISBN :
0-8186-7554-3
DOI :
10.1109/ICCD.1996.563571
