[LLVMdev] Implementing the ARM NEON Intrinsics for PowerPC

[David Tweed]

(Note: these are personal opinions rather than anything from my employer.)

Although unusual, there might be circumstances in which it would make sense.

| If you want write code that explicitly targets CPU execution units it's
| necessarily tied to that specific CPU architecture.  If you just want to
| test code for written for a different CPU on a development box your best
| bet is to use a VM like QEMU with CPU emulation.

It's possible to have either already written code to analyse, or be
intending
to write code that will eventually
be deployed on a particular mobile architecture but wish to develop that on
a desktop
machine. Using an architectural simulation will potentially incur more of a
cost than implementing as much optimization of the emulation via compiler
transformation at compile time. (Whether this is actually enough all the
work of writing
an LLVM backend is another question of course.)

Cheers,
Dave