🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Q0P1T38xds13@ficc.uu.net>, peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes
> 
> The most common compute-intensive use of scalar merge (your terminology) in
> workstations seems to be in display management: the BitBlt operator in one of
> it's many guises.  And BitBlt would benefit from bit-aligned LOAD, an operation
> that's no more expensive in real-estate than byte-aligned LOAD... a barrel-
> shifter is a barrel-shifter is a rose.

"scalar merge" is CRI's terminology, not mine, and, unfortunately, one
can't quite consider a CRAY to be a workstation.  In the case of BitBlt,
though, you're probably right.  However, that's not what I (or the cft77
compiler) use it for, but then there's more of you than there are of me.

In my experience, the main use of scalar merge is in generating masks
for vectorization code.  This is somewhat specialized, I must admit,
but unless your scalar support code is very fast, it, rather than
vector operations, will dominate the run time.

David J. Heisterberg			djh@osc.edu
The Ohio Supercomputer Center		djh@ohstpy.bitnet
Columbus, Ohio				ohstpy::djh