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Subject: Re: Eight fast 64 bits registers unused

Author: Bo Persson

Date: 06:49:03 05/13/00

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About a week ago, Bas Hamstra wrote:

>What are the experiences about using the MMX registers for 64 bits manipulations
>so far?
>
>There are 8 64-bits registers just sitting there, doing nothing! They can do
>OR/XOR/AND like normal registers, in 1 tick. common instructions are pairable,
>so 0,5 tick. They are supposed to load/unload as fast as normal registers.
>Everything one needs, you would think.
>
>I have done some experiments, and got them to work fine. One problem I see is
>that they don't set the flag register. For example: how do you test if a
>bitboard is zero? Secondly it doesn't seem as fast as I hoped, but that could
>also be my lack of asm experience.
>
>Anyone other experiences? According to "the book" it should be fast. So why
>isn't anyone using it? EIGHT mighty registers!!
>
>
>Regards,
>Bas Hamstra.


And the only three answers so far seem to be:

"Bad news is whole program will not speed up a lot...."

"I sounds like a good idea, but..."

"IMO, you would have to pay a high price for it."


Even though I tend to agree with these posters, I also really *would* like to
find something useful in MMX. Except as a basis for Intel marketing hype, of
course...


Anyone?? Please...



Bo Persson
bop@malmo.mail.telia.com





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