On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, Xavier Leroy wrote:

> malc writes:
> > To get maximal speed of the inner loops data needs to be naturally 
> > aligned. OCaml does nothing to enforce it for non-big arrays. Bigarrays on 
> > the other hand are mmaped(4k on IA32) and you get perfectly aligned data 
> > for free. I was thinking that maybe Array can be extended with
> > make[create]_aligned, for speed/space tradeoff.
> 
> As William Chester said, allocating 8-aligned arrays isn't really
> hard, but keeping them 8-aligned across copying collection,
> compaction, and structured I/O is quite a pain.
> 
> My experiments indicate that the lack of alignment on float arrays 
> (or more precisely the fact that they are 4-aligned instead of
> 8-aligned) has negligible impact on performance for the IA32 (Pentium)
> and PowerPC processors, but non-negligible for SPARC and MIPS.
> And of course on a 64-bit architecture the problem goes away because
> everything in the Caml heap is then 8-aligned.  Since I expect IA32
> and PowerPC to remain dominant until we massively switch to 64-bit
> processors, there's no urgent need to do something about float array
> alignment.

IA32 is now much bigger family, and unlucky owners of AMD 7th generation 
machines, such as myself, do pay a price for unaligned double precission
float accesses. 

-- 
mailto:malc@pulsesoft.com

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