clock() function

[Ahmad Lashgar]

Hi Matt,

As you know, clock() function is not supported by ispc.
It is not necessary for ispc to support this function. However, it
improves the understanding of model/mapping.
Even nVidia CUDA supports this function which helps understanding some
of the important issues on GPU (like memory latency, cache
configuration and warp issue policy).

Regards,
Ahmad

[Matt Pharr]

Hi, Ahmad--

That's a good idea; this was easy to implement and it's now checked in in the tree at github.  (And it'll be in the next binary release in a week or two.)

More generally, it'd also be nice to have access to more of the HW performance counters from the standard library; this is a bit more work (mostly due to different processors providing different sets of courters).  For now I've opened an issue to track this https://github.com/ispc/ispc/issues/161.  (Patches, of course, always welcome, if someone has experience with those.)

Thanks,

-matt