3 ms·
Yes. Careful selection of compilation flags can greatly improve performance. My employer spends many millions of dollars annually running numerical simulation
by KMag 5y ago
Yes. Careful selection of compilation flags can greatly improve performance.
My employer spends many millions of dollars annually running numerical simulations using double precision floating point numbers. Some years ago when we retired the last machines that didn't support SSE2, adding a flag to allow the compiler to generate SSE2 instructions had a big time and cost savings for our simulations.
- jcranmer 5y ago> Some years ago when we retired the last machines that didn't support SSE2, adding a flag to allow the compiler to generate SSE2 instructions had a big time and cost savings for our simulations. That's kind of a special case, though. Without SSE2, you're using x87 for floating-point numbers, and even using scalar floating point on x87 is going to be a fair bit slower than using scalar floating point SSE instructions. Of course, enabling SSE also allows you to vectorize floating point at all, but you'll still be seeing improvements just from scalar SSE instead of x87.