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