Polymorphic Processors: How to Expose Arbitrary Hardware Functionality to Programmers

In this paper, we describe a way to extend the flexibility of hardware and provide the programmer with an arbitrary number of processing units to use. To achieve our goals, we present a new programming paradigm, a new instruction set architecture, a microcode-based microarchitecture, and a compiler methodology. The programming paradigm, in contrast with the conventional programming paradigm, mixes general-purpose conventional code with hardware descriptions and allows ultra complex instructions. The instruction set is designed such that it requires only a one-time extension for every family of computers. It requires only 8 instructions that are capable of invoking emulation. Emulation is combined with the micro- architecture to allow high-speed reconfiguration and execution. Finally, it is indicated that a compiler can be built to automatically transform a program to conform with the described polymorphic processing paradigm.