Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: some quotes on switch and indirect branches

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 18:32:18 11/23/05

Go up one level in this thread


On November 23, 2005 at 15:51:01, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On November 21, 2005 at 20:00:24, Eugene Nalimov wrote:
>
>>On November 21, 2005 at 18:10:54, Dieter Buerssner wrote:
>>
>>>[...]
>>>I guess, you mean this as a substitution for
>>>  if (depth < 0)
>>>    fm = fm1;
>>>  else
>>>    fm = fm2;
>>>
>>>I am surprised, that compilers are not able to do this themselves. I
>>
>>I several times tried to modify Visual C to recognize additional cases where we
>>should emit conditional moves (last time was probably a year ago for
>>x64-targeting compiler). Every time I could demonstrate win on a small
>>artificial test case, but every large real world program either showed no gain
>>or slowed down.
>
>At *which* processor was it slower. AMD or EM64T?
>
>AMD has quite a big L1 cache and has instruction cache in L2 if i understand
>correctly. That should make larger code sizes no problem.

Last I saw, AMD64 had a unified L2.  typical split L1.  Have not seen a split L2
machine that I am aware of (although one could exist...)


>
>So i assume intel EM64T became slower and as a result of that it was abandonned?
>
>Vincent
>
>>I suspect there are several reasons for this:
>>* branch predictors are good, and majority of branches can be correctly
>>predicted
>>* CMOV is long instruction; short branch is shorter, so program with less CMOVs
>>fits better into cache
>>* there is no 8-bit form of CMOV
>>* CMOV has no "CMOV reg, immediate" form; if you need it you first have to load
>>immediate into register, this executing more instructions and increasing
>>register pressure -- serious problem on x86
>>* for invalid address "CMOV reg, memory" will give you access violation even if
>>condition is false.
>>
>>Thanks,
>>Eugene



This page took 0.01 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.