RISC Machine Data Structure Word Alignment Problems?

[Peter da Silva]

In article <1925 at l.cc.purdue.edu> cik at l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
> This is another situation where the procedure is extremely slow in software.
> If the appropriate hardware were provided, this would not be a problem.  But
> would the machine then be RISC?

Who cares if it's RISC, CISC, VLIW, or a bunch of elves with abaci? If it's
fast enough, fine. If it's not, unroll the loop to the LCD of the struct
size and the data size. If that doesn't do it, recode in assembler. Then get
a faster machine (where faster is defined in terms of the problem you have
to solve: if the problem involves moving weird numbers of bits around all the
byte ops in the world won't help you). Maybe a coprocessor would help (like
having a disk controller to convert NRZ into MFM instead of doing it yourself).

Most of the time this particular operation isn't a bottleneck, so who cares
how fast it is?
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 _--_|\  Peter da Silva. +1 713 274 5180. <peter at ficc.uu.net>.
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