Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Sat, 27 Jul 1996 11:44:55 +0300 (EET DST) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: Faster make depend |
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On Fri, 26 Jul 1996 msmith@quix.robins.af.mil wrote: > > Wonder why the Alpha doesn't have idivs, btw?
Because it would mess up the integer pipeline, and the alpha designers felt (probably correctly) that integer divide wasn't important enough to make the pipelines more complex.
They could have done it with the FPU pipeline which more-or-less has the required hardware already, but then the FPU pipeline would have needed data from the integer register file, and that would have messed up the clean register file separation.
So idivs are done in software, with little (but as you found out, some) degradation. Thanks to that the rest of the chip is simpler and thus easier to do a fast implementation,
Linus
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