On Thursday, October 28, 2010 21:36:58 you wrote:
On Thursday, October 28, 2010 19:27:16 William Case wrote:
> How does the cpu search and find stuff?
>
> There is a huge amount of searching and finding of text in
> memory, conditional statements requiring comparisons, and the use of
> entry points but not exact addresses from within both kernel space and
> user space. It has occurred to me that a there is necessarily a lot of
> physical or bit comparing going on. Too much, I would think, to keep
> dumping a search criteria into a cpu register and then replacing the
> contents of a second register from a block of memory until one matches.
Believe it or not, in a nutshell that's exactly what is happening.
By the way, the sheer inefficiency of that searching algorithm (ie. what you are
complaining about) is _precisely_ one of the reasons why quantum computers are
so interesting (the other reason is the number factorization into primes). But
that's going a bit off-topic, I guess... ;-)
Best, :-)
Marko