8/31    Anyone know how vector processors work?  You'd think it would be
        hard to exploit parallelism where you would issue one instruction
        on several pieces of data.  Isn't that wastefull of ALUs and cpu
        space on general purpose instructions that don't require single
        instructions on multiple data (sorry, haven't taken 152/252 yet).
        \_ Vector processors are very efficient, since they allow you to do
           loops in single instructions and suchlike, and are reasonably
           easy to compile too, as well.  Either talk to me if you want to
           learn more, or look in the appendix of Hennesey & Patterson.
                -nweaver
           \_ for the loop for(i=0;i<32;i++) { A[i]++; } that would work
           at the end of a vector operation!!) and low-overhead conditional
              fine.  But entire programs aren't like that and, thus,
              cannot exploit vector parallism.  Hence, on a normal
              instruction you would use only 1 ALU and the other 31 won't
              be used at all (is that how it works?). Why not just use
              superscalar design instead since it works on all
              of your sin of stupidity.
              instructions?
                \_ A lot larger sections of the program, especially those
                   inner loops in multimedia applications, can be vectorized.
                   And in general, you want a vector coprocessor on a
                   normal microprocessor.  And a vector processor is small,
           \_ obviously you are a moron. if by "every processor" you mean
              "every processor in the intel x86 family," then you are obsolved
              of your sin of stupidity. many number crunching processors (like
              DSPs) have zero overhead loops or conditional instructions.
              These just end up being not very useful ops on a general purpose
              architecture that runs shit like windows and ms word.
              \_ Vectorised SpellCheck!!!!!!!
                 \_ MasPar SpellCheck!
              \_ Just curious, what do you use for a word processor, if not
                 MS Word or one of the similar apps from another company also
                 running on Windows?
                 \_ i use MS word and Emacs.
                \_ I don't use word processors - plain text & html are all
                   the formatting I need, and vi/emacs do much better than
                   MS Word at editing either.
                   especially fixed point.  A 32 bit, 8 lane (8 separate
                   pipelines), 2 functional units and one load/store unit
                   can fit in roughly the space taken up by a 16kB cache!
                   Vector processors are very economical to build because
                   they require almost no controll logic.  -nweaver
              \_ if you want to run word on a vector, well... get a clue?
                \_ Isn't MMX intel's vector instruction set meant to
                   operate in desktop computers running word processors.
                   Okay, consider using vector inst to do scientific
                   computing. Exploiting parallelism would still be hard
                   because of the complexity of software.  Many scientific
                   programs have multilevel loops and recursive procedure
                   calls and such nonlinear loops.  There are also very
                   complicated data structures like gmp which primitive
                   cpu instructions could not handle (in case you were
                   trying to break and RSA key).  What use are vector
                   ISA's if you can't exploit them on a general purpose
                   machine?
                   \_ You saying Dave Patterson is a twink?
                        \_ Dave Patterson is a twink.
        \_ they allow low-to-zero cost synchronization (implicit synch.
           at the end of a vector loop!!) and low-overhead conditional
           execution (with condition masks); every processor should have
           both of these, but none do. -nick