26-bit computing: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 20:30, 20 August 2005

Revision as of 18:18, 21 August 2005

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''(The Program Counter is always word-aligned, so the lowest two bits are always zero. The designers took advantage of this and used these two bits of the PC to hold the processor's mode bits.)''

This design enabled more efficient [[Computer_program|program]] execution, as the Program Counter and Status flags could be saved and restored with a single instructionoperation. This resulted in faster [[subroutine]] calls and [[interrupt]] response than traditional designs, which would have to do two register load/saves when calling or returning from a subroutine.

==History==