Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!ncar!oddjob!uxc!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!urbsdc!aglew
From: aglew@urbsdc.Urbana.Gould.COM
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Sw vs. Hw BitBlit.
Message-ID: <28200182@urbsdc>
Date: 28 Jul 88 16:06:00 GMT
References: <399@ma.diab.se>
Lines: 25
Nf-ID: #R:ma.diab.se:399:urbsdc:28200182:000:1096
Nf-From: urbsdc.Urbana.Gould.COM!aglew    Jul 28 11:06:00 1988


>It's an old debating trick to try to make points against the opposing
>view by mis-characterizing it and then arguing against the distorted
>image.
>
>Every one posting on this subject advocating cpu data shuffling for
>displays has tried to fake us all out by pretending that this is
>done in word sized units all neatly aligned on word boundaries.
>
>Now let's see your software timings for real _bit_blit_ operations
>such as moving a block 37 bits wide aligned starting at bit 17 in the
>source position and starting at bit 29 in the destination position
>on a machine with 32-bit registers and data paths.
>
>Thos Sumner       (thos@cca.ucsf.edu)   BITNET:  thos@ucsfcca

Has anyone got usage statistics for Blit operations? Like, how many
are well aligned, on word/halfword/byte boundaries? How many are to
characters, etc.?

About 3 years ago when I was trying to choose areas for research,
statistics for graphics operations like those we are familiar with
for instruction set usage was suggested. I haven't been looking
in the meantime - has anybody done work on this?

aglew@gould.com