The Software Optimization Cookbook

Book excerpt: Revealing the secrets of the software tuning process, The Software Optimization Cookbook provides recipes for high-performance applications on the Intel? Pentium? III and Pentium? 4 processors. Simple explanations and C language examples show you how to address performance issues with algorithms, memory access, branching, SIMD instructions, multiple threads, and floating-point calculations. With this book, you need not be a processor architect or assembly language expert to get the full power out of your software on the 32-bit Intel Architecture. Learn how to: Use performance tools and tested concepts to analyze and improve applications. Determine which portions of an application should be given highest priority for optimizations. Identify the reasons that certain portions of your application are slower than they should be. Improve an application by working directly on the root cause of a software bottleneck. Design an application from the ground up for maximum performance.