Of course, Herb. That goes without saying.
Evidently it matters enough to Adobe and the development of Photoshop
to put in the effort. The kind of performance work being done in this
area is well beyond what can be done with the compiler's code
optimization. The person at Adobe responsible for this work is one of
the world's foremost authorities on optimized use of the Altivec
instruction set.
I probably know your friend: I worked intimately with the compiler
team at Apple for some years.
Godfrey
On Sep 1, 2005, at 4:00 PM, Herb Chong wrote:
there are very, very few cases where that matters enough anymore to
pay someone to do it. i have lots of friends at IBM's compiler
research group. optimal code generation is a solved problem as far
as the research community is concerned. the fact that GCC isn't
very good at it is the project of one of my friends. Apple is
paying him to fix the code optimizer to what he says is 25 year old
technology since he invented it 25 years ago.
Herb....
----- Original Message ----- From: "Godfrey DiGiorgi"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, September 01, 2005 1:14 AM
Subject: Re: Gimp, Anyone?
There is some, particularly in the components that are optimized
to to take advantage of the native hardware signal processing
capabilities integrated into the PowerPC G4/G5 and Pentium series
cpus. Hand-coded instructions in these critical sections, by
someone who knows how to take advantage of them, can net enormous
gains in processing speed. It's very carefully factored, of course.
