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>"What we do know is outside some niches (like DSPs, where VLIW reigns king)" Interesting, why is VLIW is so predominant in DPS chips?
by bogomipz 8y ago
>"What we do know is outside some niches (like DSPs, where VLIW reigns king)"
Interesting, why is VLIW is so predominant in DPS chips?
- gaius 8y agoBecause VLIW is a great idea but we only know how to compile DSP code effectively for it, that being a subset of general-purpose code
- blattimwind 8y agoBecause typical DSP code does calculations using predictable memory access patterns and usually contains very little logic. This makes it possible to largely statically schedule the code. It's fairly similar in that regard to e.g. GPU shaders (and indeed GPUs have used VLIW-like designs in the past) and scientific data crunching code.
- gpderetta 8y agoalso DSP code has a decent amount of instruction level parallelism.
- bogomipz 8y ago>"typical DSP code does calculations using predictable memory access patterns and usually contains very little logic." Thanks, that's what I was missing - the access patterns of signal processing is what makes VLIW a good fit. Is there any other use case where VLIW architectures are prevalent or are DSPs the primary use case?