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Path: eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.iecc.com!.POSTED.news.iecc.com!not-for-mail From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: branch guessing, Microarchitectural support for counting Date: Thu, 26 Dec 2024 19:11:01 -0000 (UTC) Organization: Taughannock Networks Message-ID: <vkk9o5$25bs$1@gal.iecc.com> References: <2024Oct3.160055@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> <8IcMO.249144$v8v2.147178@fx18.iad> <37dc69bc0327e6d56e452090424c80c9@www.novabbs.org> <20241226123229.0000222a@yahoo.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Thu, 26 Dec 2024 19:11:01 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: gal.iecc.com; posting-host="news.iecc.com:2001:470:1f07:1126:0:676f:7373:6970"; logging-data="71036"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@iecc.com" In-Reply-To: <2024Oct3.160055@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> <8IcMO.249144$v8v2.147178@fx18.iad> <37dc69bc0327e6d56e452090424c80c9@www.novabbs.org> <20241226123229.0000222a@yahoo.com> Cleverness: some X-Newsreader: trn 4.0-test77 (Sep 1, 2010) Originator: johnl@iecc.com (John Levine) According to Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com>: >Yes, compilers often generate such code. >When coding in asm, I typically know at least something about >probability of branches, so I tend to code it differently: The first version of FORTRAN had a FREQUENCY statement which let you tell it the relative likelihood of each of the results of a three-way IF, and the expected number of iterations of a DO loop. It turned out to be useless, because programmers usually guessed wrong. The final straw was a compiler where they realized FREQUENCY was implemented backward and nobody noticed. Unless you've profiled the code and you data to support your branch guesses, just write it in the clearest way you can. -- Regards, John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly