25 Sep
2018
25 Sep
'18
2:20 a.m.
On 9/24/18, Peter Jeremy <peter(a)rulingia.com> wrote:
In the specific case of x86, I would dispute that. The various warts in
the
x86 instruction set and "architecture" mean that x86 code density is
relatively low and on a par with SPARC code. I agree that the overall
performance is impressive but that is more a measure of the abilities of
Intel's engineers than the overall approach.
No doubt about it--x86 instruction encoding is butt-ugly and wasteful,
due to the need for backward compatibility with what was originally an
8-bit architecture. Does SPARC have the vector instructions that have
been added to x86 over the years?
-Paul W.