| Designer | Microprocessor Research and Development Center |
|---|---|
| Bits | 32-bit |
| Introduced | 1999 |
| Design | RISC |
| Encoding | Fixed |
| Branching | Condition code |
| Endianness | Little |
| Page size | 4 KiB |
| Registers | |
| General-purpose | 31 |
| Floating point | 32 |
Unicore is the name of a computer instruction set architecture designed by the Microprocessor Research and Development Center (MPRC) of Peking University in the PRC. The computer built on this architecture is called the Unity-863.[1] The CPU is integrated into a fully functional SoC to make a PC-like system.[2]
The processor is very similar to the ARM architecture, but uses a different instruction set.[3][better source needed]
It is supported by the Linux kernel as of version 2.6.39.[4] Support will be removed in Linux kernel version 5.9 as nobody seems to maintain it and the code is falling behind the rest of the kernel code and compiler requirements.[5]
Another interesting example is unicore32, which actually shares more code with arch/arm than the proposed arch/aarch64 does. I think the unicore32 code base would benefit from being merged back into arch/arm as a third instruction set, but the additional maintenance cost for everyone working on ARM makes that unrealistic.