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Grand Unified Theory of SIMD

Posted by Hemos on from the the-string-theory-of-SIMD dept.

Glen Low writes " All of a sudden, there's going to be an Altivec unit in every pot: the Mac Mini, the Cell processor, the Xbox2. Yet programming for the PowerPC Altivec and Intel MMX/SSE SIMD (single instruction multiple data) units remains the black art of assembly language magicians. The macstl project tries to unify the architectures in a simple C++ template library. It just reached its 0.2 milestone and claims a 3.6x to 16.2x speed-up over hand-coded scalar loops. And of course it's all OSI-approved RPL goodness. "

4 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. So what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

    Big freaking deal. Hardware and software are irrelevant. It's all about content now.

  2. Re:Moore's Law has eroded the need for assembly by geoffspear · · Score: 2, Funny
    99% of all jobs in the world require no programming at all. Therefore, there is no need for anyone anywhere to learn C.

    90% of the worlds' people do not own cars. Therefore, there is no need for gas stations. If you pick a living human completely at random from the earth, chances are they don't drive one of these "car" things.

    --
    Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
  3. Re:Black Art? Uh... by Leo+McGarry · · Score: 3, Funny

    Yes, I think the person who wrote the summary revealed a little more of his own ignorance than he meant to. I don't consider calling "vec_add" inside a loop to be a black art.

  4. OSI-approved RPL goodness. Admit it.... by Pyrosophy · · Score: 2, Funny

    This story doesn't really mean anything and people are just making up comments.