Operand Sizes
MIPS instructions can manipulate different-sized operands
- single bytes, two bytes ("halfword"), four bytes ("word")
Many instructions also have variants for signed and unsigned
Leads to many opcodes for a (conceptually) single operation, e.g.
-
lb ... load one byte from specified address
-
lbu ... load unsigned byte from specified address
-
lh ... load two bytes from specified address
-
lhu ... load unsigned 2-bytes from specified address
-
lw ... load four bytes (one word) from specified address
-
la ... load the specified address
All of the above specify a destination register
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