Floating point intrinsics working on PowerPC
Tuesday, May 9, 2006
The compiler now inlines machine code for floating point operations instead of calling the runtime. This results in a performance improvement on my 2.5 Ghz PowerPC G5:
Benchmark
Before
After
Mandelbrot
10.5
5.4
Raytracer
61.1
41
Here are the x86 results (Pentium 4 1.8 GHz):
Benchmark
Before
After
Mandelbrot
8.7
4.3
Raytracer
44.3
33.2
The Before column is 0.81, the After column is 0.82, and times are in
seconds.
Yes, a five year old box beats my brand new G5, but I suspect this is
because my compiler doesn’t do instruction scheduling.
Bigger gains will come as the higher levels of the compiler improve,
resulting in more inlining.