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MIPS32® microAptiv™ and M5150 Core Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) Overview

Last modified by Microchip on 2023/11/09 09:01

The Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) of a Central Processing Unit (CPU) refers to the lowest-level interface between the programmer and the CPU, and includes the following aspects:

  • Data types
    • Supported operand representations
  • Operations on data
    • Arithmetic/other operations that can be performed on the operands
  • Instruction format
  • Memory organization
  • Addressing modes

​ISAs are also often referred to as the Programmer's Model of a CPU.

PIC32MZ, with the MIPS32® microAptiv™ MPU core, implements the MIPS32 Release 2 architecture in a five-stage pipeline. It includes support for the microMIPS™ ISA.

PIC32MZ, with the MIPS32 M-Class M5150 MPU core, implements the MIPS32 Release 5 architecture in a five-stage pipeline, in addition to the features supported by the microAptiv core ISA.

These ISAs are classified as load/store or register-register type (i.e. Arithmetical Logical Unit (ALU) operations act on register operands only - no memory references). On modern CPUs, this is done to decouple CPU speed from main memory speed.

​Refer to MIPS® Architecture For Programmers Volume I-A: Introduction to the MIPS32® Architecture for more information on the CPU programming model for the MIPS32 core.