Grand Unified Theory of SIMD

Glen Low writes " All of a sudden, there's going to be an Altivec unit in every pot: the Mac Mini, the Cell processor, the Xbox2. Yet programming for the PowerPC Altivec and Intel MMX/SSE SIMD (single instruction multiple data) units remains the black art of assembly language magicians. The macstl project tries to unify the architectures in a simple C++ template library. It just reached its 0.2 milestone and claims a 3.6x to 16.2x speed-up over hand-coded scalar loops. And of course it's all OSI-approved RPL goodness. "

So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Big freaking deal. Hardware and software are irrelevant. It's all about content now.

Re:Moore's Law has eroded the need for assembly

[geoffspear]

99% of all jobs in the world require no programming at all. Therefore, there is no need for anyone anywhere to learn C.

90% of the worlds' people do not own cars. Therefore, there is no need for gas stations. If you pick a living human completely at random from the earth, chances are they don't drive one of these "car" things.

Re:Black Art? Uh...

[Leo McGarry]

Yes, I think the person who wrote the summary revealed a little more of his own ignorance than he meant to. I don't consider calling "vec_add" inside a loop to be a black art.

OSI-approved RPL goodness. Admit it....

[Pyrosophy]

This story doesn't really mean anything and people are just making up comments.