[LLVMdev] Advice on architecture research project?

Benjamin Ylvisaker
Thu, 09 Jun 2011 20:48:45 -0000

I am interested in working on a little architecture project that
involves modifying an ISA in some non-trivial ways and seeing what
impact it has on instruction frequencies (and other such metrics).
Clearly I'll need to hack on a compiler backend, and I thought that
LLVM might be a good choice since among mature compiler
infrastructures it's fairly young and presumably relatively clean.  I
will also need to choose an ISA and a functional simulator (which I
will also need to hack) for the evaluation.  I'm not particularly
interested in micro-architecture level accuracy, so I'd rather avoid
that complexity if possible.  I think I'd rather start with an ISA
more in the RISC family.

Does anyone have a suggestion about ISAs for which there is a good
LLVM backend and an open source/customizable functional simulator?

Thanks,
Ben