Thumb
<processor> An extension to the Advanced RISC Machine architecture,
announced on 06 March 1995 by Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. By identifying the
critical subset of the ARM instruction set and encoding it into 16 bits, ARM has
succeeded in reducing typical program size by 30-40% from ARM's already
excellent code density. Since this Thumb instruction set uses less memory for
program storage, cost is further reduced.
All Thumb-aware processor cores combine the capability to execute both the
32-bit ARM and the 16-bit Thumb instruction sets. Careful design of the Thumb
instructions allow them to be decompressed into full ARM instructions
transparently during normal instruction decoding without any performance
penalty. This differs from other 32-bit processors, like the Intel 486SX, with a
16-bit data bus, which require two 16-bit memory accesses to execute every
32-bit instruction and so halve performance.
The patented Thumb decompressor has been carefully designed with only a small
amount of circuitry additional to the existing instruction decoder, so chip size
and thus cost do not significantly increase. Designers can easily interleave
fast ARM instructions (for performance critical parts of a program) with compact
Thumb code to save memory.
(1995-03-14)
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