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Assembly has never been dead in the realm of multimedia processing, or for that matter, anywhere that you have to do an enormous amount of SIMD-able number crun
by DarkShikari 17y ago
Assembly has never been dead in the realm of multimedia processing, or for that matter, anywhere that you have to do an enormous amount of SIMD-able number crunching.
Find a video (en|de)coder without SIMD and you've found an unusable piece of software.
There's a reason that Intel focuses so much on SIMD instructions and arithmetic units with each new chip release: if not for SIMD or dedicated hardware, it would be physically impossible to decode 1080p video on almost any modern machine.
- jacquesm 17y agoI know. The problem is that people have really no idea how relevant assembler really still is. It's posts like these that can help getting the 70's stigma that assembler seems to be associated with removed. Someone ought to do a major article about assembler in todays IT environment. Who does it, why they do it and why it is relevant.
- jrockway 17y agoFind a video (en|de)coder without SIMD and you've found an unusable piece of software. Also worth noting that these video decoders tend to crash hard on invalid input. Tradeoffs.
- DarkShikari 17y agoNot a tradeoff; that's just bad input checking. Most of ffmpeg's decoders have heavy checks in them--crashes are usually bugs (missing checks). Yes, the checks have a small speed cost, but it's at most 1-2%, probably less.
- didroe 17y agoCouldn't a vectorizing compiler be used to generate the code rather than assembler?