Editing MIPS architecture (section)

=== MIPS III ===

MIPS III is a [[backwards-compatible]] extension of MIPS II that added support for [[64-bit]] memory addressing and integer operations. The 64-bit data type is called a doubleword, and MIPS III extended the general-purpose registers, HI/LO registers, and program counter to 64 bits to support it. New instructions were added to load and store doublewords, to perform integer addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and shift operations on them, and to move doubleword between the GPRs and HI/LO registers. For shared-memory multiprocessing, the ''Load Linked Double Word'', and ''Store Conditional Double Word'' instructions were added.<ref name="mips-ll-sc"/> Existing instructions originally defined to operate on 32-bit words were redefined, where necessary, to sign-extend the 32-bit results to permit words and doublewords to be treated identically by most instructions. Among those instructions redefined was ''Load Word''. In MIPS III it sign-extends words to 64 bits. To complement ''Load Word'', a version that zero-extends was added.

The R instruction format's inability to specify the full shift distance for 64-bit shifts (its 5-bit shift amount field is too narrow to specify the shift distance for doublewords) required MIPS III to provide three 64-bit versions of each MIPS I shift instruction. The first version is a 64-bit version of the original shift instructions, used to specify constant shift distances of 0–31 bits. The second version is similar to the first, but adds 32<sub>10</sub> the shift amount field's value so that constant shift distances of 32–63 bits can be specified. The third version obtains the shift distance from the six low-order bits of a GPR.

MIPS III added a ''supervisor'' privilege level in between the existing kernel and user privilege levels. This feature only affected the implementation-defined System Control Processor (Coprocessor 0).

MIPS III removed the Coprocessor 3 (CP3) support instructions, and reused its opcodes for the new doubleword instructions. The remaining coprocessors gained instructions to move doublewords between coprocessor registers and the GPRs. The floating general registers (FGRs) were extended to 64 bits and the requirement for instructions to use even-numbered register only was removed. This is incompatible with earlier versions of the architecture; a bit in the floating-point control/status register is used to operate the MIPS III floating-point unit (FPU) in a MIPS I- and II-compatible mode. The floating-point control registers were not extended for compatibility. The only new floating-point instructions added were those to copy doublewords between the CPU and FPU convert single- and double-precision floating-point numbers into doubleword integers and vice versa.