Built-in type efficiency

Question

Under The most efficient types second here

...and when defining an object to store a floating point number, use the double type, ... The double type is two to three times less efficient than the float type...

Seems like it's contradicting itself?

And I read elsewhere (can't remember where) that computations involving ints are faster than shorts on many machines because they are converted to ints to perform the operations? Is this true? Any links on this?

Answer 1

Depending on the hardware, the actual CPU (or FPU if you like) performance of double is somewhere between half the speed and same speed on modern CPU's [for example add or subtract is probably same speed, multiply or divide may be different for larger type], when compared to float.

On top of that, there are "fewer per cache-line", so if when there is a large number of them, it gets slower still because memory speed is slower. Per cache-line, there are half as many double values -> about half the performance if the application is fully memory bound. It will be much less of a factor in a CPU-bound application.

Similarly, if you use SSE or similar SIMD technologies, the double will take up twice as much space, so the number of actual calculation with be half as many "per instruction", and typically, the CPU will allow the same number of instructions per cycle for both float and double - except for some operations that take longer for double. Again, leading to about half the performance.

So, yes, I think the page in the link is confusing and mixing up the ideal performance setup between double and float. That is, from a pure performance perspective. It is often much easier to get noticeable calculation errors when using float - which can be a pain to track down - so starting with double and switching to float if it's deemed necessary because you have identified it as a performance issue (either from experience or measurements).

And yes, there are several architectures where only one size integer exists - or only two sizes, such as 8-bit char and 32-bit int, and 16-bit short would be simulated by performing the 32-bit math, and then dropping the top part of the value. For example MIPS has only got 32-bit operations, but can store and load 16-bit values to memory. It doesn't necessarily make it slower, but it certainly means that it's "not faster".

Answer 2

One can always argue about the quality of the contents on the site you link to. But the two quotes you refer to:

...and when defining an object to store a floating point number, use the double type, ...

and

... The double type is two to three times less efficient than the float type...

Refer to two different things, the first hints that using doubles will give much less problems due to the increased precision, while the other talks about performance. But honestly I wouldn't pay too much attention to that, chance is that if your code performs suboptimal it is due to incorrect choice of algorithm rather than wrong choice of primitive data type.

Here is a quote about performance comparison of single and double precision floats from one of my old teachers: Agner Fog, who has a lot of interesting reads over at his website: http://www.agner.org about software optimizations, if you are really interested in micro optimizations go take a look at it:

In most cases, double precision calculations take no more time than single precision. When the floating point registers are used, there is simply no difference in speed between single and double precision. Long double precision takes only slightly more time. Single precision division, square root and mathematical functions are calculated faster than double precision when the XMM registers are used, while the speed of addition, subtraction, multiplication, etc. is still the same regardless of precision on most processors (when vector operations are not used).

source: http://agner.org/optimize/optimizing_cpp.pdf

While there might be different variations for different compilers, and different processors, the lesson one should learn from it, is that most likely you do not need to worry about optimizations at this level, look at choice of algorithm, even data container, not the primitive data type.

Answer 3

These optimizations are negligible unless you are writing software for space shuttle launches (which recently have not been doing too well). Correct code is far more important than fast code. If you require the precision, using doubles will barely affect the run time.

Things that affect execution time way more than type definitions:

1. Complexity - The more work there is to do, the more slowly the code will run. Reduce the amount of work needed, or break it up into smaller, faster tasks.

2. Repetition - Repetition can often be avoided and will inevitably ruin code performance. It comes in many guises-- for example, failing to cache the results of expensive calculations or of remote procedure calls. Every time you recompute, you waste efficiency. They also extend the executable size.

3. Bad Design - Self explanatory. Think before you code!

4. I/O - A program whose execution is blocked waiting for input or output (to and from the user, the disk, or a network connection) is bound to perform badly.

There are many more reasons, but these are the biggest. Personally, bad design is where I've seen most of it happen. State machines that could have been stateless, dynamic allocation where static would have been fine, etc. are the real problems.