| the-pi-guy said:
Yep. Some of the optimizations that compilers can make are ridiculously impressive. |
That's because the more advanced compilers tend to exploit a lot of the CPUs hidden features that a lot of programmers never take into account, such as interleaving instructions for optimised use of SMT, re-ordering assembly language for better use of eg. Intel's branch prediction logic, down to storage order and spatial locality.
From what I can understand, the Cell used the PowerPC instruction set. However, the way it processed these instructions was different to IBMs other CPUs, due to the architecture of the Cell. Therefore, it would make sense why ND might have manually optimised some code using assembly language, especially if the PowerPC compilers used were optimised more toward the IBMs CPUs and not the Cell.
However, on an architecture as old and thoroughly optimised as x86/x64, the benefits of assembly language over a well advanced compiler range from absolute minimal to counterproductive.
That being said, there may be a little gain if compilers aren't yet optimised toward Zen2. However, I doubt this will be anything like we saw with the Cell.
