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MMIX

Key facts

CPU architecture.name: MMIX
CPU architecture.image: Mmix.png
CPU architecture.image_size: 220px
CPU architecture.alt: MMIX logo
CPU architecture.designer: Donald Knuth
CPU architecture.bits: 64-bit
CPU architecture.design: RISC
CPU architecture.encoding: fixed
CPU architecture.branching: condition code
CPU architecture.endianness: big
CPU architecture.open: Yes, royalty free
CPU architecture.registers: 32 special-purpose registers
CPU architecture.gpr: 256 (Special-purpose registers rL and rG control which registers can be seen)

via Wikipedia infobox

Article

13 sections

Contents

Architecture
Instructions
Registers
Local register stack
Special registers
Hardware implementations
Software tools
Simulators and assembler
Compiler
See also
References
Further reading
External links

MMIX (pronounced em-mix) is a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture designed by Donald Knuth, with significant contributions by John L. Hennessy (who contributed to the design of the MIPS architecture) and Richard L. Sites (who was an architect of the Alpha architecture). Knuth has said that: "MMIX is a computer intended to illustrate machine-level aspects of programming. In my books The Art of Computer Programming, it replaces MIX, the 1960s-style machine that formerly played such a role… I strove to design MMIX so that its machine language would be simple, elegant, and easy to learn. At the same time I was careful to include all of the complexities needed to achieve high performance in practice, so that MMIX could in principle be built and even perhaps be competitive with some of the fastest general-purpose computers in the marketplace."

Knuth started the design of MMIX in 1999, and released the stable version of the design in 2011. The processor is numbered as "2009" with Knuth explaining that this is the arithmetic mean from the numbers of other computer architectures; as well as being "MMIX" in Roman numerals.