Why AMD is blowing smoke up your ass about Opteron

[Keith R. Williams]

@twister01.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com>, news.tally.bbbl67
@spamgourmet.com says...

Although it may not be necessary to use full-fledged assembly, even the C
code is a bit more architecture-specific when doing low-level stuff like
device drivers. Like you don't really have to take into account stuff like
endian orders when writing application code, but you often do when writing
low-level. Or you may have to adjust the size of an element in a structure
when converting from 32-bit to 64-bit. So yes, you can bit-bang with C, but
the C that comes out is not really the most portable.

Again, if you're writing to the metal, who cares about "multi-
platform"? The metal will be different on the other platform, so
it doesn't really make sense to discus it. One can write "to the
metal" in either C or ASM, and it won't be multi-platform.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

Again, if you're writing to the metal, who cares about "multi-
platform"? The metal will be different on the other platform, so
it doesn't really make sense to discus it. One can write "to the
metal" in either C or ASM, and it won't be multi-platform.

Exactly, that's why it was such a moronic idea for the writer of that
article to be claiming that the portability between x86 and AMD64 is not
useful.

Yousuf Khan

 

[RusH]

Well, hell. Isn't it rather moronic to be discussing ASM vs.
&HLL. for "multi-platform" code? ...and very little software
really is "multi-platform".

for example
kernel-source\usr\src\linux-2.4.20\drivers\video\vga16fb.c
this one is multiplatform (386/m68k for sure), is low level and is
written in C. I see no point in spoiling it with assembler.

Maybe its not enough low level for you "

Pozdrawiam.

 

[Keith R. Williams]

for example
kernel-source\usr\src\linux-2.4.20\drivers\video\vga16fb.c
this one is multiplatform (386/m68k for sure), is low level and is
written in C. I see no point in spoiling it with assembler.

Maybe its not enough low level for you "

Ok, you got me. I wuz thinking more of system stuff, not
graphics. I still belive this is much in the minority of
software.