[LLVMdev] Advice on architecture research project?

[Benjamin Ylvisaker]

I am interested in working on a little architecture project that  
involves modifying an ISA in some non-trivial ways and seeing what  
impact it has on instruction frequencies (and other such metrics).   
Clearly I'll need to hack on a compiler backend, and I thought that  
LLVM might be a good choice since among mature compiler  
infrastructures it's fairly young and presumably relatively clean.  I  
will also need to choose an ISA and a functional simulator (which I  
will also need to hack) for the evaluation.  I'm not particularly  
interested in micro-architecture level accuracy, so I'd rather avoid  
that complexity if possible.  I think I'd rather start with an ISA  
more in the RISC family.

Does anyone have a suggestion about ISAs for which there is a good  
LLVM backend and an open source/customizable functional simulator?

Thanks,
Ben