Re: [PATCH 0/7] block-sha1: improved SHA1 hashing

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Aug 7, 2009, 00:13 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.2.01.0908061709400.3390@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.2.01.0908061609340.3390@localhost.localdomain>

On Thu, 6 Aug 2009, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> 
> In particular, I'm thinking about the warnign in the intel optimization 
> manual:
> 
> 	The rotate by immediate and rotate by register instructions are 
> 	more expensive than a shift. The rotate by 1 instruction has the 
> 	same latency as a shift.
> 
> so it's very possible that "rotate by 1" is much better than other 
> rotates.

Hmm. Probably not. Googling more seems to indicate that rotates and shifts have a fixed 4-cycle latency on Northwood. I'm not seeing anything that indicates that a single-bit rotate/shift would be any faster.

(And remember, if 4 cycles doesn't sound so bad: that's enough of a latency to do _16_ "simple" ALU's, since they can be double-pumped in the two regular ALU's).

I think long-running ALU ops that feed into a store (spill) also happen to be the thing that makes the dreaded store-buffer replay trap nasties happen more (load vs store scheduled badly, and then you end up spending tens of cycles just replaying).

			Linus