Assembly or ....

[Evan Bigall]

In article <960 at vsi.COM> friedl at vsi.COM (Stephen J. Friedl) writes:
>In article <1988Nov29.181235.23628 at utzoo.uucp>, henry at utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>> Alas, if you buy your newer faster CPUs from Motorola or Intel, they can't
>> tell you how many cycles each instruction takes!
>
>Why is this?  When I was hacking on the VAX, nobody could ever
>tell me how long anything took, and empirical measurements were
>pretty tedious.  Is it laziness on the vendor's part or are there
>
>    Steve

I am not sure if this is their reason, but I used to work at a place where
people would hack the micro code at night.  You would come in the next day
and everything would take different amounts of time.  Made it very difficult
to document our progress on an optimizing compiler.

Evan
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{backbone}!sun!plx!evan