Allows a twist on vanity searches: how many letters do you have to type before your name comes up. I found a friend's name on 3 keystrokes, best so far. I come in at 7 keystrokes. Celebrities and politicians are easier ("Ge" => mr. president).
This seems on target RE high-performance computing needs (kernel compilation is not a major issue, there is a whole different set of needs).
I wrote a processor-heavy simulation last year and spend a few weeks hand-coding the math into the Athlon's vector instructions (everything else was with gcc). It was a lovely and educational time, and the frame rate of the simulation jumped due to the effort. But nearly a year later I want to go back and modify the code and look on all those PUNPCKLD and PFRCPIT2 commands (not to mention the strategically placed PREFETCH0, PREFETCH1, or PREFETCHW) with despair. The code is basically locked in to its state 9 months ago as I don't dare go back into the thick of the assembly code. With hindsight, I would trade pretty good vectorized C compilation for great hand-coded assembly any day.
Furthermore, the code is locked into the AMD instruction set. I would love to know if SSE2 would be better for me but don't want to take the time to recode it all...
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Allows a twist on vanity searches: how many letters do you have to type before your name comes up. I found a friend's name on 3 keystrokes, best so far. I come in at 7 keystrokes. Celebrities and politicians are easier ("Ge" => mr. president).
This seems on target RE high-performance computing needs (kernel compilation is not a major issue, there is a whole different set of needs).
I wrote a processor-heavy simulation last year and spend a few weeks hand-coding the math into the Athlon's vector instructions (everything else was with gcc). It was a lovely and educational time, and the frame rate of the simulation jumped due to the effort. But nearly a year later I want to go back and modify the code and look on all those PUNPCKLD and PFRCPIT2 commands (not to mention the strategically placed PREFETCH0, PREFETCH1, or PREFETCHW) with despair. The code is basically locked in to its state 9 months ago as I don't dare go back into the thick of the assembly code. With hindsight, I would trade pretty good vectorized C compilation for great hand-coded assembly any day.
Furthermore, the code is locked into the AMD instruction set. I would love to know if SSE2 would be better for me but don't want to take the time to recode it all...