On Monday 11 November 2002 11:54, Simon Marlow wrote:
I should add that I never actually benchmarked the speed difference between using bits and bytes, and I don't believe it's clearly a win to use bytes. There's the time to get the data off the disk, caching effects, etc. to take into account, all of which tend to be more important the more recent your machine is.
Nowadays, the bandwidth inside the ALUs (most chips are superscalar) beat the
memory bandwidth by far so you have time to interleave any memory transfer
code with a good number of ops.
I remember that we could do that on the MC68000 8 years ago and a good FORTRAN
compiler should be knowing about this fact of modern architectures for more
than a decade.
Actually if you can achieve a significant saving in space, the bitstream
approach would be faster!
Regards,
--
Eray Ozkural (exa)