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To: muzosi who wrote (65082)	12/6/2001 9:25:15 PM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 275872

"'d be very surprised if any one can beat any existing compiler (however god awful they are) which generates ia64 code :-)." Ok, ia64 or VLIW) might be an exception, but I am not convinced as of yet. I remember that RISC was supposed to be where compilers can beat a good human programmer, but compilers can only beat an average human programmer. I haven't seen any figures for VLIW yet...

To: muzosi who wrote (65082)	12/7/2001 12:50:14 AM
From: Petz	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

muzosi, in fact, for ia64, the advantage held by a good programmmer is even greater. Especially true for scientific vector number-crunching. I personally programmed a VLIW machine (240 bits) to do a Hough transform in a 3-clock-cycle loop. A Hough transform is used to find straight lines in images. It was one of the things that Darpa used to compare supercomputer performance. The interesting thing about the 3-cycle loop is that different sections of the CPU were simulataneously calculating 5 separate iterations of the 3-cycle loop. This, of course required that, if the number of angles or number starting points for the lines was less than 5, special code was needed. I told my boss that the machine was too complicated for an efficient compiler to ever be written for it, but they wasted a few $million trying, anyway. I have a strong belief that really really good compilers for IA64 will never be written. Petz