When Light Speed Isn't Fast Enough

Advanced Optimization Techniques

The seminar

Originally held at assembly '05. Video version available here.

As the name suggests, it focuses on optimization techniques. I'm talking about things "mildly" architecture-specific, that is things common to nearly all modern architectures, without harping on specific Details too much (so no assembly-language hacking :).

Slides

You can download the slides here.

References / Further Reading

Topics in "seminar order":

• Memory/Cache optimization
  • I don't know good general articles on this, but both Intels and AMDs optimization manuals are helpful guides if you're coding on x86 Platforms; those are links for the 32-bit parts. And Intel seems to be fond of changing their website directory structure every 2 months or so, so if the link dies, just drop me a mail.
• Fast rot-zooming
  • Well, there's always pascal's original source code. As already hinted at in the seminar, take the description with a grain of salt (current caches are much bigger and better), but this is still a classic.
• AGP Writes
  • The ultimate reference on different types of memory, their characteristics and how to use them properly is the IA-32 Intel® Architecture Software Developer's Manual, Volume 3 (Chapter 10).
• Radix sort
  • Submissive's Radix-Sort tutorial is a nice introduction to the topic.
  • Zappy's Radix Sort Revisited discusses how to do Radix Sort with floats (although there is a simpler way to do it).
  • Michael Herf's article on the topic describes ways to make it simpler (and even faster!)