Intel Corp (INTC)

[DewDiligence]

>> Despite the cute name CMS is just a JIT compiler… because CMS is in operation on the fly interleaved with program execution it has to be very parsimonious in the types of profile information it can capture and examine and the types of computationally intensive code optimizations it can employ… <<

You overstate your case somewhat because TMTA’s CMS optimizes in real time –not just in “compile time.” As sections of code are executed repetitively, the CMS caches them and avoids re-translation. This makes it more than “just a JIT compiler.”

>> getting a decent architectural performance improvement from going from a 4 way VLIW to an 8 way VLIW is a problem of first order difficulty even when your compiler has full access to program source code information, extensive global run time profiling information, and virtually unlimited compile time. But in the case of TMTA, CMS lacks all three and as a result a really difficult problem is made much worse. <<

As I mentioned above, the CMS does do run-time profiling. But I agree with your contention that the CMS is a heck of a challenging algorithm, and that’s why David Ditzel hired some of the best software engineers on the planet for this project. Regards, Dew