AFAIK the alpha counters are 32bit, too?
: It's not nearly that bad. The biggest bottleneck is probably memory
: speed, not CPU cycles, and we do all memory transfers in units of
: cache lines already, not words. We'll still just be doing a
: read-modify-write of a single cache line whether the update is for a
: single 32-bit word or a 64-bit doubleword. This is assuming you have
: got a write-back cache, of course; a 486 with write-through cache will
: be a full memory write worse off for the 64-bit counter update.
If we use 32bit counters and test for overflows to increment a second 32 bit
counter we will avoid writing the second 4bytes most of the time.
Greetings
Bernd
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