Description: After years of development and anticipation, the new Intel IA-64 processor architecture is set to begin shipping in mid-2000. In this book, leading HP computer architect Dr. Peter Markstein presents the first comprehensive look at IA-64's breakthrough elementary math functions. This information will be crucial to every developer and computer scientist who wants to build IA-64 server applications and operating systems with optimum speed and power. In the first half of the book, Markstein introduces the IA-64 architecture, the objectives that motivated its design, and the unique architectural features that can be exploited by developers of high-performance elementary function libraries. Markstein reviews software pipelining, instruction grouping, pre-fetching, predication, speculative execution, explicit parallelism, and other key features of the IA-64 architecture. Next, he discusses each major elementary function, demonstrating how it can be implemented to provide optimal IA-64 performance and accuracy. The book introduces several techniques that lend themselves to software pipelining, which is exceptionally well-supported by the IA-64 architecture, and can lead to dramatic performance gains.

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