[LLVMdev] LLVM and Cell processor

[Chris Lattner]

On Mon, 20 Nov 2006, [ISO-8859-1] Sébastien Pierre wrote:
> I've been following LLVM for a couple of years, and though I've not
> found an occasion to use it (yet), I'm always curious about its
> potential uses.

cool. :)

> I was discussing with friends about the Cell processor, and some of
> the arguments were that it is difficult to program and difficult to
> optimize. One of the concerns was that the PPE (central processor) is
> "in order", which implies that the compiler has to be able to
> optimize the code in a much more advanced way.

Right.

> I don't know if LLVM will support the Cell, but I was wondering if
> there are features that allow to produce code that will be optimized
> for "in order" processors.

Sure.  LLVM has strong support for vector operations and has support for 
low-level scheduling with hazard recognition/pipeline modeling.  I'm not 
aware of anyone working on a Cell port of LLVM, but it would be a welcome 
addition if anyone were interested in tackling the project.

-Chris

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