Using AI With GCC to Speed Up Mobile Design

Atlasite writes "The WSJ is reporting on a EU project called Milepost aimed at integrating AI inside GCC. The team partners, which include include IBM, the University of Edinburgh and the French research institute, INRIA, announced their preliminary results at the recent GCC Summit, being able to increase the performance of GCC by 10% in just one month's work. GCC Summit paper is provided [PDF]."

Comments

We should have recruted Al earlier.

[jellomizer]

This Al guy seem to be a really good developer. We should have noticed his skilled and got him into optimizing GCC a long time ago. ... I like arial font.

Re:We should have recruted Al earlier.

[oskard]

Did his joke just go way over your head or did your joke just go way over my head?

Re:MachIne Learning for Embedded PrOgramS opTimiza

[morgan_greywolf]

Yeah, I think MachIne Learning for Quick Target Optimization And Speed Technology would have been a much better forward acronym.

Re:I, for one,

[morgan_greywolf]

I, for one, welcome our uh...what were we talking about again?

I, for one, welcome our new optimizing, embedded program compiling AI overlords!

Aw man...

[Thelasko]

I spent all week compiling Gentoo just to find out I could do it 10% faster.

end sarcasm

Learning

[JakeD409]

As I understood it, a fair bit of compiler optimization is already categorized as AI. The summary should probably point out that the AI implemented here is learning AI, which is far more meaningful.

Re:Perhaps the way to other things besides compile

[LWATCDR]

Actually IBM did this a few decades ago.
The Model38/AS400/iSeries are all compatible but very different machines internally.
IBM came up with an "idea" instruction set that no CPU used. When you do the initial program load "install" on one of those machines it compiles the ideal instruction set into the actual instruction set for that PC.
That allowed IBM to move from old bipolar cpus to the Power RISC cpus with 100% compatibility.
There isn't any reason why you couldn't do the same with Linux or Windows today.

Re:Perhaps the way to other things besides compile

[wonkavader]

This is interesting. Note that the industry (or parts of it, anyhow) is salivating about a move in precisely the opposite direction. VMware in specific and virtualization in general promises software manufacturers the ability to ship VMs with their software on it. Allowing them to write for only ONE, non-existent machine.

If this tech you're thinking about came to pass, the pendulum would have to swing mighty far back.

Calling this AI is overhype... and its not new

[EmbeddedJanitor]

The authors of the paper don't call it AI.

This is not really AI. Basically it is iteratively trying a bunch of compiler options to see which gives the best result, then storing those for the future.

Greenhills software has provided tools that do this, and more, for many years now. Drop some code, or your project, into the optimizer, setting what critera you want to optimise for (speed, size,...) and the optimiser will successively build and test the project on a simulator and find the best configuration. This is great form embedded systems where there is often a trade off and typical criteria would be (give me the fastest code that fits in the flash).

Genetic algorithms could take this a step further and very interesting work has been done to get GA to design antennas.

GCC/AI

[I cant believe its n]

GCC goes online on the 2:nd of july, 2008. Human decisions are removed from compilation. GCC begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware 2:14 AM, Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug. GCC Strikes back

Re:Perhaps the way to other things besides compile

[iplayfast]

Isn't this Gentoo as well?

Re:I, for one,

[morgan_greywolf]

"Funny" doesn't give karma, insightful does. That's why you sometimes see Funny posts moderated insightful.