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Subject: Re: Expert Assembler Question

Author: Ed Schröder

Date: 05:42:09 08/27/05

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On August 27, 2005 at 05:36:51, Gerd Isenberg wrote:

>On August 27, 2005 at 04:34:03, Ed Schröder wrote:
>
>>On August 27, 2005 at 00:43:29, Tony Werten wrote:
>>
>>>On August 26, 2005 at 18:12:30, Ed Schröder wrote:
>>>
>>>>I am no longer up-to-date regarding the newest processors (such as the AMD-64)
>>>>and the internal working concerning speed, hence my question:
>>>>
>>>>Which (similar) code is faster?
>>>>
>>>>       test    byte ptr xxx,1    |        test    byte ptr xxx,1
>>>>       je      label             |        mov     AL,[ECX]
>>>>       mov     AL,[ECX]          |        je      label
>>>>       mov     BL,[EDX]          |        mov     BL,[EDX]
>>>>       ...     ........          |        ...     ........
>>>>       ...     ........          |        ...     ........
>>>>label:                           | label:
>>>>
>>>>Thanks in advance,
>>>
>>>Hi Ed,
>>
>>Hey Tony,
>>
>>
>>>probably not what you wanted to know, but the code is quite different from each
>>>other.
>>>
>>>If the jump condition is met 50% of the time, then the left code will execute
>>>the 2 moves 50% of the time for an average of 1 move per loop and the right side
>>>100%+50% is 1.5 moves per loop on average.
>>>
>>>Did you mean something else ?
>>
>>Yep :)
>>
>>The background of my question is the processor's capability to do 2 instructions
>>at the same time. Following this logic the code on the right (in principle) is
>>supposed to be faster.
>>
>>
>>
>>>2 BTW's:
>>>
>>>1 Depending on what you do with AL and BL, you might want to use the full
>>>registers by doing movzx eax,[ecx] and movzx ebx,[edx] (No penalty on new
>>>processors)
>>
>>That's good to know, thank you.
>
>
>Yes, reading bytes to partial registers is expensive anyway, 4 cycles latency.
>
>MOV reg8, mem8 8Ah mm-xxx-xxx DirectPath 4
>MOV AL, mem8   A0h            DirectPath 4

Are you saying Gerd that:

 mov EAX, mem32 is faster than mov AL,mem8 ?



>Tony is right - zero extending to ax,eax,rax is also 4 cycles.
>
>MOVZX reg16/32/64, mem8 0Fh B6h mm-xxx-xxx DirectPath 4

This is clear, not much has changed.



>If you have some "global", very often used array[eg. 64], it might be worth to
>waste some memory (eg. four cachelines instead of one) and switch to native
>32-bit int size:
>
>MOV reg16/32/64, mreg16/32/64 8Bh 11-xxx-xxx DirectPath 1
>
>Also, avoid the shorter but redundant EAX-Move encoding:
>
>MOV AX/EAX/RAX, mem16/32/64 A1h DirectPath 4/3/3

Right, never us it.

Ed



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