Category: Patreon Posts

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Foray into optimisation with SIMD – Part 1

I’ve been playing around with SSE recently to explore the performance benefits of using it in some performance sensitive sections of code. I’ve initially applied it to updating an AABB (Axis Aligned Bounding Box) from a rotated previous bounding box. I‘ve created a small repo that performs micro-benchmarking of non-SIMD and SIMD versions benchmarked using picobench in case it’s of use to others. The results when running a release build under gcc 7.4 (64 bit build) with optimisation disabled -O0:

===============================================================================
   Name (baseline is *)   |   Dim   |  Total ms |  ns/op  |Baseline| Ops/second
===============================================================================
       benchmark_normal * |       8 |     0.002 |     208 |      - |  4799040.2
           benchmark_simd |       8 |     0.001 |      62 |  0.301 | 15968063.9
       benchmark_normal * |      64 |     0.013 |     205 |      - |  4876933.6
           benchmark_simd |      64 |     0.004 |      58 |  0.285 | 17112299.5
       benchmark_normal * |     512 |     0.100 |     194 |      - |  5128667.4
           benchmark_simd |     512 |     0.031 |      61 |  0.315 | 16269980.0
       benchmark_normal * |    4096 |     0.838 |     204 |      - |  4885630.2
           benchmark_simd |    4096 |     0.251 |      61 |  0.299 | 16328548.3
       benchmark_normal * |    8192 |     1.669 |     203 |      - |  4907605.0
           benchmark_simd |    8192 |     0.474 |      57 |  0.284 | 17265216.7
===============================================================================

Not quite 4x as we’d expect but pretty close 🙂 However, with -O3 it’s 1:1. To be continued…

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Cross compiling C/C++ libraries for Android (updated)

There are a few forms a C/C++ library that you want to cross compile to Android might come in.

For instance:

  • An Autotools project
  • A CMake project

To get started let’s make a standalone Android toolchain (a toolchain being compilers, libraries and headers for cross compiling our source code to a specific target architecture and platform ABI) . Continue reading Cross compiling C/C++ libraries for Android (updated)