[Info-vax] x86-64 data aligment / faulting

[John Dallman]

In article <f36424d5-82da-4455-8d3c-491f60241ff7n at googlegroups.com>,
gah4 at u.washington.edu (gah4) wrote:

> On Sunday, February 27, 2022 at 6:43:41 AM UTC-8, Bill Gunshannon 
> wrote:
> > When the Alpha first came out its attackers used to provide 
> > example code that performed very badly to prove they were 
> > better. Wasn't this one of the methods used to write those 
> > really bad performing programs? This and forcing repeated 
> > dumping of the pipelined instructions? 
> 
> As well as I remember it, Alpha only has 32 bit and 64 bit aligned
> load/store instructions.  If you want something else, you do it with
> some other instructions.  Shifts and such. 
> 
> If the compiler does all that for you, it will be pretty slow.

The first generation of Alpha had that limitation, but 8-bit and 16-bit
load and store operations were added as the "Byte-Word eXtensions".

John