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Subject: Re: Ed's "indirect addressing"

Author: Matt Taylor

Date: 23:23:57 01/30/03

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On January 30, 2003 at 08:42:07, Russell Reagan wrote:

>On January 30, 2003 at 04:55:09, Bruce Moreland wrote:
>
>>This speed stuff is worth thinking about, but it's way more important to think
>>about move ordering, pruning, extensions, and good eval.
>
>I agree. I had a little brain fart when thinking about it. I remembered Ed
>saying "one instruction" and recalled it as saying "one cycle", and then I went
>crazy thinking about the possibilities of generating moves at a rate of 1 move
>per handful of cycles using a series of jump tables to jump tables. Then I
>realized this must be too good to be true. But yes I agree with you, it's not
>really important.

Jump tables used to be free because the CPU had to fetch the next instruction
anyway. Jump tables weren't free on the Pentium, and an interesting Pentium bug
made the CPU mispredict things, and sometimes it would mispredict instructions
that -can't- branch. However, it was still cheap. Pipelines have grown
significantly since the (IIRC) 7-stage Pentium, and it is no longer even cheap.

If you have 1,000 different cases, jump tables are obviously cheaper than 1,000
different compares. They are still useful...but in an eval where you can reduce
the number of cases, there should be a better way.

-Matt



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