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In the C programming language, Duff's device is a way of manually implementing loop unrolling by interleaving two syntactic constructs of C: the do-while loop and a switch statement. Its discovery is credited to Tom Duff in November 1983, when Duff was working for Lucasfilm and used it to speed up a real-time animation program.
On modern processors, loop unrolling is often counterproductive, as the increased code size can cause more cache misses; cf. Duff's device. [1] The goal of loop unwinding is to increase a program's speed by reducing or eliminating instructions that control the loop, such as pointer arithmetic and "end of loop" tests on each iteration; [2 ...
See the article on loop unrolling for more on solutions to this problem, but note that software pipelining prevents the use of Duff's device. [citation needed] In the general case, loop unrolling may not be the best way to implement software pipelining. Consider a loop containing instructions with a high latency. For example, the following code:
While working at Lucasfilm, he created Duff's device, a loop unrolling mechanism in C. On August 22, 2006, the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued U.S. patent 7,095,409 to Pixar for a "Shot shading method and apparatus" invented by Tom Duff and Robert L. Cook.
Simon Tatham's contribution, [38] based on Duff's device, is a notable example of the genre, and is the basis for Protothreads and similar implementations. [39] In addition to Duff's objections, [ 24 ] Tatham's own comments provide a frank evaluation of the limitations of this approach: "As far as I know, this is the worst piece of C hackery ...
Duff Goldman is opening up about the scary car crash that's led to a painful right hand injury that may or may not need surgery, depending on how his hand recovers in the coming days and weeks.The ...
An implementation of this paradigm can "unroll" a loop internally. This allows throughput to scale with chip complexity, easily utilizing hundreds of ALUs. [3] [4] The elimination of complex data patterns makes much of this extra power available. While stream processing is a branch of SIMD/MIMD processing, they must not be confused.
The rocker opens up about sobriety, panic attacks, his new album, and how he and his wife still "dig each other in every specific way you could imagine" nearly three decades after being set up on ...