Re: Funny?

Daniel Wang <danwang@atomic.CS.Princeton.EDU> wrote:
><jukkaj@ping.at> writes:


>> I just created a Visual C++ program under Windows 95 which runs
>> slower when it is optimised for speed. And which runs faster when
>> it is a debug version without any optimisation and lot of extra
>> debug code.


>Just a guess, but sounds like the optimizer is unrolling some loop so that
>the "optimized" code no longer fits in the instruction cache, so you're
>paying a cache hit on every loop. The debug version is probably faster since
>it fits in the cache.


I remember a long time ago when I tried the main loop of a program
which had been written in assembler on the various compilers for a CDC
6500. Following Knuth's article on Fortran optimization, the best
that any conceivable Fortran compiler could do was 45%; to do better
would have required register management across blocks and conditional
calls. The non-optimizing compilers got about 33%, with half the loss
due to not being able to use assembler instructions for one small code
segment. The optimizing compilers got 23% efficiency; they made too
many wrong assumptions.
--
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399
hrubin@stat.purdue.edu Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558
--

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