Jack on 17 February 2007
sieanr said:
Also. Great job tackling the question about cells ability to do branch prediction. Talking about... shaderes on a GPU.... sure has allot to do with that.....
What question about branch prediction? You made a statement an incorrect statement but hey whatever. The cell does branch prediction on the PPE on the SPE they do a branch hint. Which hints where the branch should go. If the branch hint does not match with a branch instruction it should be recorded to see if a pattern appears in which case you can pick a better branch hint. This all depends on the programmers talent if you are implying that most game programmers are bad at their job then your earlier statement would be correct. Of course most of the branch hints and branch prediction should be done by the compiler.