12-11-2013, 08:42 PM
The reason why barrel shifters are stupid is because their simply unnecessary. I presume you are going to hook that thing up to your IS, Clock etc. So with each clock cycle, you can shift all of your bits to the left / right. Okay, cool. Which program did you ever encounter that you needed to shift 5 bits to the left? At least i haven't seen something like that. And if i do need to somehow shift my bits 2 positions to the left, i'll just use my shift command twice. I find that more effectively than slowing down your ALU, and having that much extra space taken by a device that will probably never shift more than 1 time.