Overview of the ARM’s architecture
The ARM’s architecture is interesting because it has elements of both the conventional CISC architecture such as Motorola’s 68K and Intel’s 32/64-bit architectures, together with the more radical streamlined RISC architecture of processors such as MIPS and RISC-V.
Here, we will examine the following:
- The ARM’s register set
- Arithmetic instructions
- Special addition and subtraction instructions
- Multiplication and ARM’s multiplication and addition instruction
- Bitwise instruction
- Shifting operations
We don’t cover data movement operations in detail here. We have already encountered the mov operation that can be used to load a literal into a register – for example, mov r1,#12. Similarly, the str and ldr instructions load a register from memory and store a register in memory, respectively. A typical example is ldr r4,[r5] and str r0,[r9]. These two instructions...
