On 10/28/10 1:57 PM, William Case wrote: > How does the cpu search and find stuff? It doesn't. All the cpu can do is compare one thing to another (within the limits of its spec, e.g. bytes, 32-bit ints etc.). Some cpus can do direct memory-to-memory comparisons, others can only do memory-to-register or register-to-register. You need to look at the architecture handbook to find out. Everything else is software. Many clever algorithms have been invented to minimize the number of comparisons you need to do to get a match (in fact to reject a match in most cases), and whole books have been written about them, bu that wasn't your question.
Some special-purpose searching hardware existed years ago on some very specific projects, but AFAIK that sort of thing doesn't really pay off when you compare hardware development time with the speedup in general-purpose hardware, so I don't know if it still exists. poc -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
