This has the side effect of confusing gcc-4.2.1's optimizer into more
often doing the right thing. When it does the wrong thing here, it
seems to be mainly making too many copies of x with dependency chains.
This effect is tiny on amd64, but in some cases on i386 it is enormous.
E.g., on i386 (A64) with -O1, the current version of exp2() should
take about 50 cycles, but took 83 cycles before this change and 66
cycles after this change. exp2f() with -O1 only speeded up from 51
to 47 cycles. (exp2f() should take about 40 cycles, on an Athlon in
either i386 or amd64 mode, and now takes 42 on amd64). exp2l() with
-O1 slowed down from 155 cycles to 123 for some args; this is unimportant
since the i386 exp2l() is a fake; the wrong thing for it seems to
involve branch misprediction.
exponent bits of the reduced result, construct 2**k (hopefully in
parallel with the construction of the reduced result) and multiply by
it. This tends to be much faster if the construction of 2**k is
actually in parallel, and might be faster even with no parallelism
since adjustment of the exponent requires a read-modify-wrtite at an
unfortunate time for pipelines.
In some cases involving exp2* on amd64 (A64), this change saves about
40 cycles or 30%. I think it is inherently only about 12 cycles faster
in these cases and the rest of the speedup is from partly-accidentally
avoiding compiler pessimizations (the construction of 2**k is now
manually scheduled for good results, and -O2 doesn't always mess this
up). In most cases on amd64 (A64) and i386 (A64) the speedup is about
20 cycles. The worst case that I found is expf on ia64 where this
change is a pessimization of about 10 cycles or 5%. The manual
scheduling for plain exp[f] is harder and not as tuned.
This change ld128/s_exp2l.c has not been tested.
long doubles (i386, amd64, ia64) and one for machines with 128-bit
long doubles (sparc64). Other platforms use the double version.
I've only done runtime testing on i386.
Thanks to bde@ for helpful discussions and bugfixes.
