Welcome to the TORCH Home Page
Stanford's TORCH Project
(under construction)
Description
TORCH is an experimental superscalar processor architecture which
includes the following features,
- multiple instructions may be issued in parallel each cycle
- the compiler can schedule both sequential and speculative
instructions
- speculative instructions are executed conditionally and later
committed or squashed based on the result of a subsequent branch
- a special NOP bit in the instruction encoding improves code density
by eliminating the need for most explicit NOP's
- instructions are encoded in a 40-bit word
- the instruction set is a super-set of the
MIPS
R2000/R3000
RISC instruction set
- unmodified
MIPS
R2000/R3000
programs can be executed in a compatibility mode
If you would like to learn more about TORCH please read the
TORCH Architectural Specification
(or get a PostScript
copy [224K])
More Information
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-
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-
-
FTP
You can get a complete copy of the
TORCH distribution
[4096kB]. This includes the compiler, simulators, C library, a suite of
pre-compiled test programs, and some other miscellaneous tools. If you are only
interested in part of the distribution follow the links above until you find
what you are looking for. We do recommend that you get the whole distribution
the first time you download the software. After that you can probably just
update particular tools.
Compatibility
To run the
Software Tools
you will need a DECstation 5000/200 (or faster) running Ultrix 4.2A (and maybe
higher). You will also need a C++ compiler (we
recommend g++ 2.4.5). We have compiled all of the software tools on SGI
Indys. However, at the moment we have not fixed the endian-ness problem
(TORCH is little-endian and SGI machines are big-endian). This is not a
huge problem. If you fix it please let us know.
You will also need
GNU make.
You can get it from prep.ai.mit.edu or one of it's
mirrors. If you do not have GNU make you will have to slightly
modify some of the makefiles.
We have tested the
Verilog model
using
Cadence's
Verilog-XL 1.6.5 through Verilog-XL 2.0.5, and on VCS
2.3.2. If you use a different simulator please let us know.
If you want to use the
Verilog Model
we recommend you get
Systems Science's Magellan.
It is the best Verilog debugger and waveform
viewer we know of. It can be used both with interactive simulations,
or for post-simulation analysis. It supports co-simulation, digital,
behavioral, and analog data, and has a nice API. It includes a source
level debugger, navigator, backtracking, register display, waveform
display, etc. They have an educational program, and if you qualify,
you can get SSI's software for free
(edu@systems.com).
For more information contact SSI at 415.812.1800, or
info@systems.com.
Aknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge
ARPA
for providing the support for the many TORCH related research projects.
Many thanks also to the nice people of System Science who give us free
licenses. Without their products we would never have been able to catch
all the bugs.
Copyright
Copyright (c) 1994-1995 Stanford University.
All Rights Reserved.
This software is distributed with *ABSOLUTELY NO SUPPORT*
and *NO WARRANTY*. Use or reproduction of this code for
commerical gains is strictly prohibited. Otherwise, you
are given permission to use or modify this code as long
as you do not remove this notice.
Last modified 7/9/95 by
Ricardo E. Gonzalez.
Comments and suggestions to:
torch@chroma.Stanford.EDU.
TORCH related people