RE: [Caml-list] 32 bit floats, SSE instructions

[Brian Hurt <bhurt@spnz.org>]

On Mon, 7 Jun 2004, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

> At the cost of inverting almost everyone's software architecture.  This
> is ridiculous / stupid in the real world.  It's also baloney on
> theoretical grounds: for just how many problems do you think it's worth
> destrying memory coherence by putting structure elements very far apart
> in memory?  If you only want to do SoA "for some array length, then
> start over," just how segmented did you think I wanted my programming
> model to be?
> 
> SoA might make sense if a language implementation did it totally behind
> the scenes, presenting a seemingly AoS interface to programmers.
> Exposing / locking into SoA is dumb, and yes, Intel is damn dumb.  You
> don't think they're dumb, look at their chips.  They're good at fab and
> marketing, they make lousy tack-on "kitchen sink" chips.
> 

You're right.  The only computations which are a) regular enough and b)  
common enough to make it *possibly* worthwhile to consider the contortions
SoA order would entail are if you are doing openGL in software.  At which
point the guy who is just handing those computations over to his $60
graphics card is stomping your butt.

Forget I said that.

-- 
"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive,
difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of
mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it."
                                - Gene Spafford 
Brian

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