developer's mag
main page
article
part 1
part 2
part 3
part 4
part 5
part 6
part 7
part 8
part 9
9 - Conclusion
This has been a whirlwind introduction into programming assembly code. Obviously, in such a short space not everything can be covered, but the function and accompanying source code will provide you a steppingstone. This column's code is the usual SEB/source file package. The program lets you run the Sieve with varying limits, and lets you see the performance between the three versions discussed here: unoptimized C, optimized C, and assembly code.On my ebm, the times for each routine to search to one million were 98, 36, and 9 seconds respectively. An over 10x increase in speed shows that assembly code is still crucial for speeding up time-critical source code - key to that on the ebm is the flexible register set and the one-cycle instructions of the Sneak32.
Previous Section