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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Porter who wrote (41713)	11/18/1998 12:05:00 AM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572556

Steve - Re: "spend an entire semister programming on a Commodore 64.. " Is this the new 64 Bit Processor/PC from Commodore? Sure took them a long time to come up with a new model ! Paul

To: Steve Porter who wrote (41713)	11/18/1998 12:55:00 AM
From: Scumbria	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572556

Steve, I can write code that fits inside a normal (64K) L1 cache and data that fits in there too.. therefore, with the advent of instructions in 3d-now and soon KNI, I can preload the data into the cache, run compute intensive operations (matrix mults, etc.) at very high-speed. There certainly are combinations of experienced programmers and specific problem types where this can be done. Generally speaking the data set for most compute intensive tasks (like graphics rendering) is likely to far exceed the size of any cache. For these type problems, if the data can be read ahead as a series of sequential pipelined addresses, the dram latency can be hidden and the CPU will become bandwidth limited. One advantage of x86 is the code density. You can fit a lot more useful code into the instruction cache than you can with RISC. Good programmers like yourself make us hardware guys look good. If OS/Compiler programmers and CPU designers occasionally communicated with each other, everyone's computer would run a lot faster. Scumbria

To: Steve Porter who wrote (41713)	11/18/1998 1:17:00 AM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572556

<A lot of programmers today have no idea about tight code. I believe that anyone who is learning to code in school today should be forced at some point to spend an entire semister programming on a Commodore 64.. then they will learn about clock-counts and the like.> Steve, those days of programming are over, unless you want to plan a house by worrying about every single nail and screw. These days, structured programming takes precedence over tight assembly code. The most important thing about programming is not that it's tight, optimized, and fast, but that it's easy to read, maintain, and debug. Only afterwards do you make the code fast in the places where it counts. The big problem these days isn't code bloat, but feature creep. Just ask Microsoft, the king of feature creep. By using coding practices that emphasizes time-to-market over stability and maintainability, they've earned the negative reputation that they now have to endure. As for tight, optimized code, the emphasis these days is to shift all that over to the compiler. This allows the programmer to concentrate on the bigger picture and stick to structured programming techniques. Tenchusatsu