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Date:	Sun, 4 Jan 2004 11:17:53 PST8
From:	"Steven Levine" <steve53@earthlink.net >
Reply-To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Programming: Optimization techniques (was QA equals testing, Part One:Detection)

In <3FF841A2.7397@peterskye.com>, on 01/04/04
at 08:38 AM, Peter Skye said:

>And I disagree. My own financial optimization software is all written
>high-level and specifically avoids doing calculations which take "a lot
>of time", and it does this by splitting numeric values into components
>and then doing the calculations with the components. It's a lot faster
>this way and couldn't have been done without an understanding of the
>hardware instruction set.

I suspect I'm somewhat familiar with some of the techniques you have used.
In the past, they were are often needed to get reasonable performance out
of fixed-poing DSP algorithms and low-level GUI code.

Back in the 8086 and 80286 days when you did a lot of your original code,
you really had no choice or you would still be waiting for results.

However, over time the performance of FP hardware has increased
dramatically to the point where often there's little if any performance
difference between floating point and fixed point operations on a given
system.

Have you done any recent studies to ensure that your fixed point methods
still outperform floating point methods on today's typical PC?

Regards,

Steven

--
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"Steven Levine" MR2/ICE 2.41 #10183 Warp4/FP15/14.093c_W4
www.scoug.com irc.webbnet.info irc.fyrelizard.org #scoug (Wed 7pm PST)
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