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They are necessarily - they have to to make programs run faster.

For example, Alpha AXP, one of the least blown up ISAs, did not provided non-word aligned loads and stores, providing word aligned loads and stores and a way to extract and/or combine bytes and subwords from/to the whole word. And it ended having separate instructions for loading and storing every subword type. The reason I stated above - to make program run faster and to make programs smaller.

The same is true for every RISC ISA I studied.

For example, MIPS includes an instruction to store a floating point number in the reg1+reg2*arg_size address. This can be split into two RISC instructions and fused at runtime in hardware, but still here it is!



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