10 Nov
2005
10 Nov
'05
00:56
Steven T. Hatton wrote:
It's been several years since I studied this at the microcode control level, but I can only imagine compilers have extended this technology. Compilers can ofther analyse the call sequence and find ways of interleaving and prefetching that a human being would have a very hard time competing with.
Are you sure you're looking at microcode? Microcode is the software within the CPU and nowadays generally isn't available to programmers. Years ago, many mini-computers (VAX, Data General Eclipse, etc.) supported writing to microcode. Back in the days when I was a computer tech, repairing mini-computers, I used to have to trouble shoot at the microcode level, within the CPU.