Providing a laboratory for instruction set design

Computer architecture classes do not provide students with laboratory experience in the design of instruction set architectures. Projects that compare designs have not been possible due to a lack of support software. The design and evaluation of a new instruction set requires an assembler, a symbolic debugger, and a statistics gatherer. Every new instruction set requires changes to all three programs. It would be unrealistic to expect that either students or instructor would (re)write such software in order to evaluate each new design.