user manual

iv Contents
AMD Athlon™ Processor x86 Code Optimization
22007E/0—November 1999
Switch Statement Usage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Optimize Switch Statements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Use Prototypes for All Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Use Const Type Qualifier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Generic Loop Hoisting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Generalization for Multiple Constant Control Code. . . . . . . . 23
Declare Local Functions as Static . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Dynamic Memory Allocation Consideration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Introduce Explicit Parallelism into Code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Explicitly Extract Common Subexpressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
C Language Structure Component Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Sort Local Variables According to Base Type Size . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Accelerating Floating-Point Divides and Square Roots . . . . . . . . . . 29
Avoid Unnecessary Integer Division. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Copy Frequently De-referenced Pointer Arguments to
Local Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
4 Instruction Decoding Optimizations 33
Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Select DirectPath Over VectorPath Instructions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Load-Execute Instruction Usage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Use Load-Execute Integer Instructions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Use Load-Execute Floating-Point Instructions with
Floating-Point Operands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Avoid Load-Execute Floating-Point Instructions with
Integer Operands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Align Branch Targets in Program Hot Spots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Use Short Instruction Lengths. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Avoid Partial Register Reads and Writes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Replace Certain SHLD Instructions with Alternative Code. . . . . . . 38
Use 8-Bit Sign-Extended Immediates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38