[LLVMdev] arithmetical operands signedness

[Christophe de Dinechin]

On 5 sept. 2011, at 17:48, Duncan Sands wrote:

> since the result of a multiply doesn't depend on the signedness, I find it
> strange that your target differentiates between them.  What I'm saying is
> that if you have (say) two i32 numbers a and b and you do a signed multiply:
>   c = a *s b
> and an unsigned multiply
>   d = a *u b
> then c and d are the same number (exactly the same bits set).

At least two architectures I know about have size-extending multiplication, for which your statement is not true:

- Motorola MC68K has i16 x 16 -> i32 instructions in signed and unsigned forms

- Itanium has signed and unsigned multiplications with i64 x i64 -> i64 where you can take the high or low part of the resulting i128. While xma.lu is a pseudo-op since it's the same as xma.lu, xma.hu and xma.h (unsigned and signed) are distinct.

I'm pretty sure there are other similar architectures.


Regards
Christophe