[ILUG] [OT] Membership

[jac1]

>Branch prediction performance is dependant on CPU hardware and choice of
>algorithm, but can be more efficient than delay slot instruction execution.
>
>> is it something to do with groupings, eg having to make sure by hand
>> that dependent instructions are far enough 'away' from the previous
>> instruction to not be executed at the same time, ie every set of,
>> say, 2 ops are executed in parallel???
>
>no, but funnily enough alpha cpus do something like this with 'packets' of
>two
>or four instructions that get issued simultaneously to parallel pipelines.
>but that's
>another story :)
>

Pentiums are dual-pipelined aren't they?
To make matters worse, some instructions (i387) can only be executed on a 
certain pipeline (the v one IIRC)! Fairly headwrecking stuff if you're to do 
it by hand, which
is the main reason hardly anything, bar hardware stuff, is done in asm.
Compilers do a good enough job of it.

James