Performance gain through dereferencing?

2014-04-16 Thread Peter Schneider
I have made a curious performance observation with gcc under 64 bit cygwin on a corei7. I'm genuinely puzzled and couldn't find any information about it. Perhaps this is only indirectly a gcc question though, bear with me. I have two trivial programs which assign a loop variable to a local va

Re: Performance gain through dereferencing?

2014-04-16 Thread Peter Schneider
Hi David, Sorry, I had included more information in an earlier draft which I edited out for brevity. > You cannot learn useful timing > information from a single run of a short > test like this - there are far too many > other factors that come into play. I didn't mention that I have run it d

Re: Performance gain through dereferencing?

2014-04-16 Thread Peter Schneider
In order to see what difference a different processor makes I also tried the same code on a fairly old 32 bit "AMD Athlon(tm) XP 3000+" with the current stable gcc (4.7.2). The difference is even more striking (dereferencing is much faster). I see that the size of the code inside the loop for t