assembler, icc/gcc,

[Till Plewe]

I am writing a program where speed is very important.
Some parts will probably have to be written in assembler.

I have a dual-Xeon machine running CURRENT. 

I am looking for {advice on,experiences people have had with} writing
assembler programs for pentium4/xeon processors.  (I have too many
manuals right now and difficulties in deciding where to start)

In particular, I am not sure whether I should be using nasm/icc or
gas/gcc.  Nasm supports SSE2 instructions (I don't know if gas does,
the intel2gas port doesn't) which I probably need in order to
manipulate 81bit-500bit integers (sets) efficiently.  On the other
hand I would like to be able to use inline assembler but that seems to
be impossible with NASM and gcc. I don't exactly know what style
of inline assembler icc supports yet.

Besides /usr/ports/lang/intel2gas there is a nasm-2-gcc-inline
translator at Fermilab http://lqcd.fnal.gov/sse/inline.html which I
haven't tried yet. 

In any case any suggestions as to how to proceed would be appreciated.

- Till