Re: Computer architects leaving Intel...

On Mon, 16 Sep 2024 8:34:19 +0000, David Brown wrote:

On 15/09/2024 21:13, MitchAlsup1 wrote:

>
As to HW sadism:: this not not <realistically> any harder than mis-
aligned DW accesses from the cache. Many ISA from the rather distant
past could do these rather efficiently {360 SRDL,...}
>

>
Anyone who designs a data structure with a bit-field that spans two
64-bit parts of a struct is probably ignorant of C bit-fields and
software in general.  It is highly unlikely to be necessary or even
beneficial from the hardware viewpoint, but really inconvenient on the
software side (whether you use bit-fields or not).

Sometimes you don't have a choice::
x86-64 segment registers.
PCIe MMI/O registers,
..