Re: [eigen] Indexes: why signed instead of unsigned?

[leon zadorin <leonleon77@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 5/17/10, Benoit Jacob <jacob.benoit.1@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 2010/5/17 Gael Guennebaud <gael.guennebaud@xxxxxxxxx>:
>>
>>
>> On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 5:07 AM, leon zadorin <leonleon77@xxxxxxxxx>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> 'mul' being magnitude of times slower for 64 bits ints
>>
>> same here. I believe Benoit did not notice any speed difference because
>> his
>> CPU is more recent that ours.
>
> Oh right, this is on a Core i7.
>
> *starts up big motorbike*

:-) :-) :-)
Harley is it?

>> Anyway this benchmark does not represent
>> typical use cases of sizes & indexes. In theory the compiler should not
>> have
>> to issue integer multiplication inside inner loops but simply increments
>> some registers. I verified that for simple expressions. Unfortunately for
>> a
>> more complex one involving more complex addressing like:
>>
>> c.block(1,12,50,89) += a.block(7,3,50,89) + b.block(70,35,50,89);
>>
>> it seems that GCC fails at generating good code and issue 3 imull in the
>> most inner vectorized loop. The non vectorized loops (to deal with
>> boundaries or when vectorization is disabled) are fine though... ahhhh
>> compiler weirdnesses....
>
> argh, this is pretty bad! Hm though... for large enough blocks, this
> operation is totally memory-bound anyway. But then I guess the same
> phenomenon will happens in CPU-bound loops, bad bad bad...!
>
> One more reason why the LinearAccessBit is important, when it's present.
>
> If nothing else works, we could specialize the loops also in the
> DirectAccessBit case and write them by manually incrementing pointers.
>
>> Anyway, the change Benoit is doing is the necessary step to offer more
>> flexibility, then we can bench real world expressions, and finally make a
>> decision for the default index/size type of Matrix. According to the
>> result
>> of the benchs, I see two options:
>> 1) always use ptrdiff_t
>> 2) default is int + one Matrix's Option to use int64
>
> I was going to do:
>
> 3) Default is ptrdiff_t
>    + make it easy to override this global default by a macro e.g.
> EIGEN_USE_INT_INDICES
>    + later if you want we can add a Matrix option to use int.
>
> Benoit
>
>>
>>
>> gael
>>
>
>
>