Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Crafty for Psion/Palm ??

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 10:39:13 02/16/00

Go up one level in this thread


On February 16, 2000 at 13:31:46, Eugene Nalimov wrote:

>On February 16, 2000 at 12:37:00, Christophe Theron wrote:
>
>>On February 16, 2000 at 06:34:30, Tom Kerrigan wrote:
>>
>>>On February 16, 2000 at 00:26:19, Christophe Theron wrote:
>>>
>>>>I'm not even sure that this processor really supports clean 64 bits operations.
>>>>All the docs I have mention 16 and 32 bits long instructions. How do you perform
>>>>a move immediate with a 64 bits value if your instruction length is limited to
>>>>32 bits?
>>>
>>>Move immediates are a little silly on RISC processors...
>>>
>>>You can't even fill a 32 bit register with a move immediate.
>>>
>>>-Tom
>>
>>
>>So the compiler has to put the data into a static data area, then produce a
>>'move from address' instruction?
>>
>>That must be a "pleasure" to program this chip in assembly... :(
>
>Usually there are special instructions "load to low N bits", "load to high 32-N
>bits", so you can load large literal usingl something like
>    mov   r1, lo(literal)
>    movhi r1, hi(literal)
>which is way faster than going into memory. But on *some* processors (ARM,
>IBM/360) yes, you have to go into memory. Usually assembler will do the dirty
>job for you, and will translate
>        mov r1, =L'literal'
>into e.g.
>        mov r1, [pc+label]
>        ...
>label:  dc =L'literal'


There are usually other things to do too.  On a sparc, loading from R0 always
gets you '0' (of course you can xor a register with itself to do the same thing)
if you only want a 0 value.

Some machines have/had a cheap -1 "register access" as well to get a -1 which
is pretty common.



>
>Fortunately, there are not many *really* 32-bit constants in the programs (were
>it other way, processors would include instrcution 'load 32-bit value', of
>course).
>
>Eugene
>>Forgive my ignorance about RISC computers...
>>
>>
>>    Christophe



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.