From: Andy Glew (glew_at_[hidden])
Date: 1999-08-01 22:29:52
> I did my testing on a P6 system. How badly is this chip hurt
> by indirection?
Not much. P6 systems only lose 30 cycles to 100 cycles on a pointer
chasing miss.
In future systems this cost will be much higher.
I.e. I do not believe that you can test this experimentally right now.
The only possible way would be to run your code on a simulator - such as
the one I am writing.
All I can do is tell you what the trends are.
(This is the typical problem: software gets optimized for 5 year old hardware
(the P6 - Pentium III is actually a 10 year old design from my point of view),
while hardware gets optimized for 5 year old software. Although in this case
it doesn't matter: I don't know of anay unexplored track wrt speeding up
pointers. It's just the trend as long as we use CMOS.)