Customer Reviews & Comments
This is a well-written, easy to read and inspiring book that gives insight into a fascinating new technology - this is the most useful software optimization book ever written. As modern processors include many advanced features such as branch prediction, cashes with hardware prefetch, out of order execution cores, instruction level paralellism and intraregister vectorization, writing high performance software for such arcitectures is not so easy. In addition, most programming languages available today have not been delibetarly designed to take advantage of these newly introduced architecture features. It is therfore fortunate that the second edition of the software optimization cookbook gives such a useful and easy to read introduction to software optimization on modern architecures. This is most important for the engineers that develop performance critical software applications but want to ensure high readability and easily maintainable source code. For example, advanced compiler techniques such as profile guided optimization and inter procedural optimization, pedagogically described in this book, may boost the performance of your application. This is not surprising; cache misses may seriously obstruct memory intensive applications as memory is ridiculously slow compared to cache on most modern processors. The Intel processors, together with the Intel compilers and the books from Intel press, significantly simplify the job for the software developers that struggle to increase the efficiency of their applications. My experience is that the Intel compilers, tailormade to the Intel processors, take better and better advantage of the advanced features in modern processors. Thus, the development of efficient software becomes easier and easier even though the processor architecture becomes more and more complicated. Switching to the Intel compiler may significantly improve the performance of your application, thus there is no such thing as "change the compiler only"; the compiler alone may actually be responsible for most of the increased speedup seen in many applications. However, you may need to rewrite some parts of your code, as recommended in this book, to obtain a clear and readable compiler-friendly programming style - a too complicated source code tends to hamper the usefulness of the advanced optimizations available in the Intel compiler and reduces the source code readability for your co-workers.