Re: [openrisc] Huffman encoding operands

[John Leuner <jewel@pixie.co.za>]

> DOOLITTLE said:
> I disagree.  Instruction set compression (not necessarily Huffman)
> is a good thing, we all know, as it reduces memory bandwidth, and
> increases (fixed size) cache effectiveness, at the expense of slightly
> more complex instruction decoding.  And yes, you can compress operands.

Forgive me for butting in here, I've just joined the list, so I don't know
what the previous discussion was about but "instruction set compression"
prompts me to suggest hardware facilities to compress data in normal
memory. 

I've read an excellent paper on the topic by Scott Kaplan, if you're
interested have a look at:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/oops/compressed-caching/index.html

And specifically the paper:

"The Case for Compressed Caching in Virtual Memory Systems" at

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/sfkaplan/papers/compressed-caching.ps.gz

John Leuner