AMD Bulldozer - Compiler Impact on Performance

[FlavusSnow]

The question is, will bulldozer's chess performance increase as compilers are improved to target the new architecture? Or is it simply a hardware issue (too little L1 cache with too high of latency) and there is no hope?

[bob]

The question is, will bulldozer's chess performance increase as compilers are improved to target the new architecture? Or is it simply a hardware issue (too little L1 cache with too high of latency) and there is no hope?

Every processor has its quirks. A compiler can help here and there. It can hurt far more if it wants to of course... I don't think you will see any major improvements due to optimizing software tricks, however.

[rbarreira]

The question is, will bulldozer's chess performance increase as compilers are improved to target the new architecture? Or is it simply a hardware issue (too little L1 cache with too high of latency) and there is no hope?

Who knows... Once I made an optimization to a program which resulted in a 80% performance boost on the Pentium 4, and just a 10-30% improvement on other CPUs (even though this optimization did not involve using any of the new instructions like SSE etc.).

This is of course highly dependent on the particular software. There are probably programs which can hardly run better on Bulldozer and others which may benefit greatly from specific optimization tricks.