[Libre-soc-dev] Vector Supercomputing ISA and 3D GPU resources

[Jacob Lifshay]

On Tue, Sep 14, 2021, 14:23 Richard Wilbur <richard.wilbur at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> > On Sep 14, 2021, at 05:47, lkcl <luke.leighton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > * Scalar FP-to-INT conversions, likewise.  ARM has a javascript
> conversion instruction, Power ISA does not (and it costs a ridiculous 45
> instructions to implement, including 6 branches!)
>
> Are we suggesting that ARM added an instruction to its ISA specifically to
> support a particular programming language?  Furthermore, I find it very
> difficult to believe that javascript is the only language which would need
> to convert FP-to-INT.  I can only imagine javascript being the foremost
> user of such an instruction if the processor was being specifically
> designed and optimized to run javascript and the rules of javascript’s
> conversion from FP-to-INT were significantly different from those in other
> languages.
>

Arm has a designed-for-JavaScript fp->int instruction in addition to the
usual designed-for-C fp->int instruction

Jacob

>