Tag Archives: sandybridge

The Surprising Subtleties of Zeroing a Register

Posted on December 29, 2012 by brucedawson

Zeroing out a CPU register seems like the simplest and most basic operation imaginable, but in fact x86 CPUs contain a surprising amount of special logic to make this operation run smoothly. The most obvious way of zeroing an x86 … Continue reading →

Posted in Performance, Programming | Tagged , , , | 30 Comments

Out of Order Benefits

Posted on October 25, 2012 by brucedawson

A few months ago I wrote about some experiments to see how fast modern CPUs are at doing high-precision math such as is used in cryptography and high-precision fractal calculations. I recently read an article that claimed that out-of-order processors … Continue reading →

Posted in Fractals, Math, Performance, Programming | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Fractal and Crypto Performance

Posted on March 28, 2012 by brucedawson

There was some recent interest in what type of computer would run Fractal eXtreme’s deep zoom calculations fastest (and cheapest) so I wrote a benchmarking tool that isolates the inner calculations for more accurate measurements and arranged to have it … Continue reading →

Posted in Fractals, Math, Performance, Programming | Tagged , , , , , , | 24 Comments

rdtsc in the Age of Sandybridge

Posted on July 29, 2011 by brucedawson

Years ago I wrote a program that would dynamically measure the speed of my CPU. It would record the current number of CPU clock ticks with __rdtsc() (the C/C++ intrinsic for the rdtsc instruction), then wait some period of time … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged , , , | 21 Comments