While waiting for Fedora 14, a question for the engineering types re: searching and finding

[Marko Vojinovic]

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