Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      17 Dec 1997 19:13:24 +0100
From:      Eivind Eklund <perhaps@yes.no>
To:        dyson@FreeBSD.ORG
Cc:        garbanzo@hooked.net (Alex), current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Pentium optimizations
Message-ID:  <86pvmvaldn.fsf@bitbox.follo.net>
In-Reply-To: "John S. Dyson"'s message of Wed, 17 Dec 1997 01:23:22 -0500 (EST)
References:  <199712170623.BAA00476@dyson.iquest.net>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
"John S. Dyson" <dyson@FreeBSD.ORG> writes:

> I do have some PPro mods, and they appear to help performance on
> average.  The PPro is a really wierd creature (like the K6.)  The
> darned processor does so much optimization, it appears to be
> insensitive to code mods.  There are areas of reasonable payoffs,
> and lots of "obvious" optimizations that end up being neutral.

I was working with optimizing assembly code for the PPro a year ago.
My experience was that modifying code seldom mattered, except for
alignement.  Making the tight loops hit 16-byte boundaries roughly
doubled the speed.

No other approach made a significant difference, AFAIR (I just
supplied ideas and had another programmer implement them).
All pairing happened automatically, and touching the cache to make it
pre-fetch etc didn't help at all.

Eivind.



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?86pvmvaldn.fsf>