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by nxobject 248 days ago
I applaud the author for doing this! A lot of "get your hands dirty" processor digital design tutorials end up using designs with a single microprogrammed control unit... which has no relation to how the last few decades of microarchitectures,
1 comments

Indeed. My CS degree program taught me Karnough maps and some other basics, and that was enough to build a simple microprocessor design myself (it sucked, I neglected to build a way to use immediate values in instructions so I had to build a hacky "set" instruction that just set a register to a 15 bit immediate)

But I mostly can't grok things like cache implementation, or branch prediction, or pipelines, or register renaming and out of order execution, or "store forwarding" and other necessary features.

The simulator programs I was using have instant/single cycle memory access, and the cpu had single cycle execution of all instructions so it wasn't really necessary, but still.