From: Matthew French (mfrench42 at domain yahoo.co.uk)
Date: Thu 16 Aug 2001 - 16:52:49 IST
On Thu, Aug 16, 2001 at 04:32:07PM +0100, jac1 wrote:
> >no, but funnily enough alpha cpus do something like this with
> >'packets' of two or four instructions that get issued
> >simultaneously to parallel pipelines. but that's another story :)
>
> Pentiums are dual-pipelined aren't they? To make matters worse,
> some instructions (i387) can only be executed on a certain pipeline
> (the v one IIRC)! Fairly headwrecking stuff if you're to do it by
> hand, which is the main reason hardly anything, bar hardware stuff,
> is done in asm. Compilers do a good enough job of it.
As I understand it, one of the reasons Intel took over control of the
Alpha chip was so that they could have access to Digital's compiler
technology - presumably because the Itanium also has a fairly complex
pipeline structure.
- Matthew
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