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Does 68HC11 have Pipeline technique for improving the performance of the Integrated Circuit? Is 68HC11 use pipelined? I didnt find useful information Thank you

user3412182
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    I cant imagine it would have been, certainly not back then. I see they describe the number of cycles per instruction in the isa documents so that would imply a no it isnt. Doest mean there isnt some open core somewhere that does... – old_timer Mar 12 '14 at 18:36
  • Can you give more information about that? – user3412182 Mar 12 '14 at 18:41
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    what do you mean? a pipelined processor cannot document the number of clocks per instruction because "it depends", it is not possible to exactly document. So if you have the clocks documented, 1) you can usually see from the instruction and options exactly why it takes that many cycles, and 2) it isnt pipelined, in the sense that we use that word with modern processors. – old_timer Mar 12 '14 at 18:43

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If the instruction set documentation lists fixed numbers of clocks per instruction or instruction variation, then it is a pretty safe bet that no it it is not pipelined like we would think of a modern processor.

Remember that the word performance is relative, trading power and real estate for operations per second. Nothing comes for free. In the microcontroller world you might be more interested in ops per watt and price per unit than ops per second. Even with what we might call inefficient instruction sets or implementations, we still turn down the clock rates on the parts to save power, that is how much performance we have to spare...

It might be a good educational exercise to implement a pipelined clone if you are really interested in one...

old_timer
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