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) <erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr> Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo Malfunction: http://mp3.com/ariza GPG public key fingerprint: 360C 852F 88B0 A745 F31B EA0F 7C07 AE16 874D 539C