Agner`s CPU blog

Joe Duarte wrote:

I think it would be interesting if applications could set a few custom constants at start time. A while back I asked about having useful constants hardwired in the CPU (e.g. π), and you guys explained why it probably wouldn't be worth it. I think letting each application tell the CPU to save a few constants that the application will often use might be more useful. The point is to be able to invoke the constant without an immediate, but just with a much smaller shortcode (two or three bits). It's kind of like an application-specific cache

ForwardCom can have constants embedded in instructions. This includes integer constants of all sizes and floating point constants of half, single and optionally double precision (requires 1, 2 and 3 word instruction size, respectively). Your idea would require an extra register set for saving and restoring data that will be needed later. This extra register set would just require two extra instructions for copying data from a normal register to an extra register and vice versa. This could be useful for many purposes and it would reduce the pressure on the data cache. The only problem I can see is that it will be an extra complication to the function calling convention because we need to know whether a function modifies the extra registers or not.