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Programming the Cell Processor: For Games, Graphics, and Computation
book

Programming the Cell Processor: For Games, Graphics, and Computation

by Matthew Scarpino
October 2008
Intermediate to advanced
744 pages
18h 21m
English
Pearson
Content preview from Programming the Cell Processor: For Games, Graphics, and Computation

15. SPU Assembly Language

This topic is not for the faint of heart. Thus far, the book has explained Cell programming in terms of C functions with friendly names like spu_add and mfc_get. The applications operate on variables with straightforward datatypes such as vector signed short, and if you don’t know the result of an operation, you can find out by calling printf.

None of these luxuries are available when you code with assembly. The code in a *.s file consists of instructions like ai, il, hbrz, and stqx. They don’t operate on typed variables, but instead manipulate bits, bytes, halfwords, words, doublewords, and quadwords in the SPU’s general-purpose registers. This means printf won’t suffice; if you want to see what an instruction accomplished, ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780137156115Purchase book