On Tuesday 15 May 2007 11:32:16 am Brian Paul wrote: > > http://llvm.org > > I looked at LLVM a while ago too. I guess I had questions about vector > support, swizzling, writemasking and other GPU-unique constructs and how > LLVM would map them onto actual target systems. Getting parallelism > (performance) out of a chip like the 965 seems to require some fairly > intricate coding. I don't know how well LLVM would deal with that kind > of thing.
So far I don't see absolutely any problems with any of it (but then again we started the experimental branch because I'm no Miss Cleo when it comes to future-telling, plus I'm lacking the wickedly awesome Jamaican accent that is clearly required to become a psychic). LLVM supports vectors natively which we make use off. We (actually I'm not sure if Roberto hasn't done it already) haven't done any serious effort so far to make swizzling/writemasking work nicely but swizzling seems to be trivially doable via folding it into instruction selection (LLVM has pattern-matching instruction selectors for that) and writemasking looks more like a transformation in the DAG combiner. All not too difficult. Plus the fact that Apple already did it in their OpenGL implementation for a huge performance boost gives me a lot of hope (granted that the Apple implementation uses LLVM only in the software path because they do rely on proprietary drivers - we're in a really neat situation in which we already have control over the drivers and can unify the whole framework). So all in all, I don't see anything lacking in LLVM to make this totally rock (but I've been wrong before... once. and that was when i was hungry. and sick. and lets not neglect to mention hungry. did i mention hungry? besides who the hell could know that Red Sox would win the championship after being down 3:0... [for all the true geeks: that was a sports reference, don't be scarred, it's going to be over very soon]) Zack ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Mesa3d-dev mailing list Mesa3d-dev@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mesa3d-dev
