Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Wed 22nd Mar 2006 18:08 UTC
"Newer software does try to be sexier by doing flashy things such as the talking paperclip. This causes a tendency for the software to bloat to the point of saturation, i.e. until it performs at barely acceptable speeds. But application programming seems to get worse with faster processors. Even with more memory, faster disks and multiple CPUs, your average web application runs slower. Is it possible that the faster hardware has made us worse programmers?"
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Member since:2005-07-06
ASM programming knowledge is evanescent. Your ASM programmer friend is right that the XOR form can avoid partial register stalls, but only on the P6 core, which is prone to them. On that architecture, reading a 32-bit register after writing to that register's 16-bit lower half will cause the processor to stall, except with XOR or SUB. So depending on whether eax is ever read in the above fragment, the XOR form could be faster, but only for the P6 core. No other current x86 core (including P6-derivatives like the Dothan or Yonah cores), suffer from this specific case of partial register stall.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
An ASM programmer.
In the p4 manual is when they started recommending using mov wax,0 because of register stall issues. Or you can pair op codes a certain way.
I don't believe it had to do with actual clock cycles so much as register stalls and surrounding code.