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Re: Best options for 64-bit FP on athlon?




Brad Lucier wrote:

> I have a lot of FP code where the algorithms depend on setting the precision
> to 64-bits (i.e., no extended precision) for correctness.  Since I've
> heard great things on the mail lists about MMX/SSE/SSE2/... doing
> 64-bit FP faster, I want to try it.
> 
> But reading the 3.1 docs, I cannot figure out what options to give to
> get what I want.  Now, maybe I missed something, but I don't think
> it's there. 


> 
> Brad
> 
> 

Maybe not, but gcc docs don't typically go into hardware to the extent 
which appears to be needed here.  We don't know of any Athlon supporting 
SSE2, which is the only one of those architecture variants which 
supports 64-bit FP.
gcc doesn't currently support the parallel paired double instructions 
with auto-vectorization, which is the way the most impressive 
performance would be obtained with SSE2.  The options to generate scalar 
SSE2 are -msse2 -march=pentiumpro.
The option -msse doesn't generally work for P-III, but it may work for 
Athlon.  It uses both mmx and sse (32-bit floating point) without taking 
into account that they use the same register territory on a P-III.
-- 
Tim Prince
tprince@computer.org



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