AMD Releases Hammer documentation

Jonathan Graham writes: "Last Thursday AMD posted the five volume architectural manual to their new x86-64 processor on their website. The tomes are as follows: Application Programming, System Programming,General Purpose and System Instructions,128-bit Media Instructions and 64-bit Media and x87 Floating Point Instructions. Gentlemen...start your compilers! (or start writing them!)"

Comments

What a waste

[Demona]

gcc for Linux has those -i486, 586 and 686 flags, but no -amd flag, so it would seem that your spiffy Duron or Athlon doesn't take advantage of any of the chip's special features, essentially running it like a dumb fast legacy chip. That ain't my idea of efficiency. How many years did it take for the Pentium optimizations to make their way from an IBM lab into egcs and finally the mainstream gcc? By that time, AMD's were selling like hotcakes, especially among the build-your-own crowd. And this was when the dot com bubble was still growing, so it's a real shame AMD didn't stick a few developers on the necessary gcc work for that platform -- now that they're currently releasing the XP's and working on Hammer while phasing out Durons, the timing would have been perfect to release what they had for the older chips and work with the community on integrating it.

But as the roommate said, if you bothered trying to optimize your software for PC hardware it'll take you at least a year or two, by which time the hardware will be 'hopelessly outdated'. In the meantime, we get laptops that are nothing more than gigahertz crotch-warmers and desktops that are 2 gigahertz room-warmers, effectively dropping jet engines into lawnmowers and seeing a lot of energy diappear into a black hole called FALSE PROGRESS.

gcc already supports the amd x86-64

[Per Abrahamsen]

See gcc news.