On Sat, 10 Apr 1999 08:41:16 -0600, Aaron Blosser wrote:
>Also, do you plan to optimize the assembly code in any way for the new types
>of CPU's out? AMD's K6-3, Pentium III, etc. It would certainly "seem" that
>some slight tweaking could be done to squeeze out a few extra percent of
>improvement, but I could only guess at that. Maybe just recompiling the
>assembly in a compiler that is PIII/K63 aware would take advantage of the
>processor type, and then just include each compilation in the program with
>the appropriate branches into the code depending on the CPU type actually
>being used, just as you have now for PPro/PII, Pentium, etc.
You have an entirely wrong picture of what assembly is. Assembly is the
most high level programming language existing. It is _not_ a portable language
like C, where the C compiler actually _converts_ (compiles) the C code into
assembly code for the machine that is to run the program, optimizes it
and finally runs it through an assembler and linker to create the full program.
In other words, the phrase `recompiling the assembly in a compiler that is
PIII/K63 aware' is totally meaningless. There will soon be PIII aware
assemblers (for some reason, I belive gas will be one of the first... How
strange.), but all they will do is enable the user to use the new opcodes (as
well as the more `standard' opcodes, some of which have been around since the
8086 (good old days... I had an 8088)). Regardless of which assembler you use,
the code will stay at the exact same speed, as opposed to C compilers, where
it in fact can make a big difference.
Your other ideas are already being discussed on the list, I'll leave them
alone :-)
/* Steinar */
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