By: anon2 (anon.delete@this.anon.com), August 25, 2022 9:08 pm
Room: Moderated Discussions
Anon4 (anon.delete@this.example.com) on August 25, 2022 11:45 am wrote:
> Brendan (btrotter.delete@this.gmail.com) on August 25, 2022 7:54 am wrote:
> > Is it possible for a good and useful program to exist without at least one branch?
>
> It depends on how you define branch. On a completely predicated architecture
> like 32 bit ARM it's possible to do if-conversion to turn branches in to predicated
> execution then effectively unroll and in-line everything else.
>
> I was once involved with a piece of avionics software running as part of a 3 way voting system
> and one of the implementations did exactly the above ran for 30 million instructions out of
> reset with no branches to produce the output then reset the processor to run again.
Branch by pulling the reset line! That's cool.
> Brendan (btrotter.delete@this.gmail.com) on August 25, 2022 7:54 am wrote:
> > Is it possible for a good and useful program to exist without at least one branch?
>
> It depends on how you define branch. On a completely predicated architecture
> like 32 bit ARM it's possible to do if-conversion to turn branches in to predicated
> execution then effectively unroll and in-line everything else.
>
> I was once involved with a piece of avionics software running as part of a 3 way voting system
> and one of the implementations did exactly the above ran for 30 million instructions out of
> reset with no branches to produce the output then reset the processor to run again.
Branch by pulling the reset line! That's cool.