question about altivec registers

Geert Uytterhoeven geert at linux-m68k.org
Thu Oct 28 02:05:01 EST 1999


On Wed, 27 Oct 1999, Gabriel Paubert wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Oct 1999, Adrian Cox wrote:
> > As for the cache thrashing effect, remember that 512 bytes going in and
> > out of the L2 cache is not very expensive, and that there is probably 1
> > or 2MB of L2 fitted.
> 
> My feeling is that it is unlikely that the code is in the L1 cache, this
> code is not a tight loop which is executed 1000 times in a row, and it is
> probably saturating L2 cache bandwidth. If you need 8 bytes of code and 16
> bytes of data for each register save/load on average, it's 3 L2 data beats
> or 6 clocks in the most common scenario (L2 at 1/2 core frequency).

I wasn't primarily concerned about code taking space in the L1 cache, but the
saved Altived registers pushing out valuable data of the L1 cache on each save.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,
--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- Linux/{m68k~Amiga,PPC~CHRP} -- geert at linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
							    -- Linus Torvalds


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