Re: [PATCH] Expand CPU compiler options

From: John
Date: Sun Dec 09 2012 - 07:14:03 EST


> Let's see, if I'm reading the log file correctly, the average values of

> each test run differ by ~ 0.1 seconds tops.
>
> For example, i7-3770K generic build gives on average 69.41404 while
> the more optimized version 69.33554. The diff between the two is even
> less than 0.1 second. The other two machines' diff is a bit higher. And
> from looking at your graphs, this is all eaten up by stddev so I'd say
> there aren't any improvements from using a different uarch target - just
> noise. AFAICT, at least.


While I agree that the differences as small - on the order of ms - they are not insignificant nor are they in the noise of the measurements.  
1) All the assumptions for ANOVA are met:
*Data are normally distributed as show in the normal quantile plots.

*The population variances are fairly equal (Levene and Barlett tests).

2) The ANOVA plots clearly show significance.
*Pair-wise analysis by Tukey-Kramer shows significance at the 0.05 level for all CPUs compared.  Below are the differences in median values:
core2 +87.5 ms
corei7-avx +79.7 ms
core-avx-i+257.2 ms

> In any case, these results are too marginal to warrant any code change
> since they're basically disappearing in noise.


Currently, the 'core2' optimization is included in as an option for a CPU Family.  In the case of core-avx-i, I am showing an improvement of ~3x over that.  And in the corei7-avx case, the improvement is approximately equal to it.  I don't understand why these wouldn't be considered value-added since they preform at least as good as the option already included.

Thank you for the consideration and suggestions.
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