0

It is known that circular buffers are a useful part of DSP's like made by TI for efficient video or sound data processing.

Are there possible uses of these buffers in general type microprocessors like CPU's made by Intel or AMD?

Tae-Sung Shin
  • 20,215
  • 33
  • 138
  • 240
val
  • 323
  • 2
  • 8
  • 20

1 Answers1

1

Are you familiar with register windows on SPARC? Those are a sort of circular buffer for the registers. Apparently AMD and Intel have manufactured processors that used register windows too.

Anthony Blake
  • 5,328
  • 2
  • 25
  • 24
  • thanks Anthony. It's an interesting hint. Do you know what AMD or Intel processors could use the register windows? – val Nov 06 '11 at 17:55
  • @val according to wikipedia(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_window), the AMD 29000 and Intel i960 were commercial chips that used register windows. – Anthony Blake Nov 06 '11 at 22:05
  • Sure thing Anthony, The AMD 29000 are RISC processors. What I was originally wondering if circular buffers are in use in general purpose CPU's like Opteron, Athlon, etc. – val Nov 07 '11 at 01:14
  • RISC processors *are* general purpose! e.g., the ARM Cortex processors in iPad's are certainly general purpose – Anthony Blake Nov 07 '11 at 03:07
  • RISC is general purpose - Point taken :-) Can't find any indication that the latest high end server processors use register windows or circular buffer. They should, or should they? – val Nov 07 '11 at 15:37
  • I don't think SPARC T* processors use register windows, because they use "machine gun" multithreading -- and that uses a huge number of registers for each thread. But the other SPARCs still use register windows -- Fujitsu announced this SPARC based supercomputer yesterday: http://www.fujitsu.com/global/news/pr/archives/month/2011/20111107-01.html – Anthony Blake Nov 07 '11 at 23:41
  • Hey Anothony, I missed your reply :-( You seem to be right again, thanks. BTW, I found that sometimes people use "circular buffers" in "linear" mode as an option. Why do you think people need to use the RB in dual mode? – val Nov 10 '11 at 22:58