Powers of Ten (so to speak)

I am not sure if you are old enough to remember the 1977 IBM movie Powers of Ten (trippy version, without narration) [also at the IMDB and wikipedia], but that’s a movie that sure put things in perspective. Thinking in terms of powers of ten helps me sort things out when I am considering a design problem. Thinking of the scale of a problem in terms of physical scale is a good way to assess its true importance for a project. Sometimes the problem is the one to solve, sometimes, it is not. It’s not because a problem is fun, enticing, or challenging, that it has to be solved optimally right away because, in the correct context, considering its true scale, it may not be as important as first thought.

Maybe comparing problems’ scales to powers of ten in the physical realm helps understanding where to put your efforts. So here are the different scales and what I think they should contain:

More Blinking Lights (and a disgression)

In Blinking Lights I told you about how I feel the modern computer for its exterior, except for its screen, is boring. When I look at my Antec case, I see a large, silent black box, which, by its very definition, is uninteresting at best. Something like a rock that slowly dissipates heat.

However Bill Buzbee built a computer that has an interesting exterior, and a much more interesting interior: the Magic-1. The Magic-1 is a computer running at 4.something MHz, and is in the same computational power range as the original 8086 4.77 Mhz IBM PC, except with a more advanced instruction set.

The Magic-1 Computer

The LP64 model and the AMD64 instruction set

Remember the old days where you had five or six “memory models” to choose from when compiling your C program? Memory models allowed you to chose from a mix of short (16 bits) and long (32 bits) offsets and pointers for data and code. The tiny model, if I recall correctly, made sure that everything—code, data and stack—would fit snugly in a single 16 bits segment.

With the advent of 64 bits computing on the x86 platform with the AMD64 instruction set, we find ourselves in a somewhat similar position. While the tiny memory model disappeared (phew!), we still have to chose between different compilation models although this time they do not support mixed offset/pointer sizes. The new models, such as LP32 or ILP64, specify what are the data sizes of int, long and pointers. Linux on AMD64 uses the LP64 model, where int is 32 bits, and long and pointers are 64 bits.

Using 64 bits pointers uses a bit more memory for the pointer itself, but it also opens new possibilities: more than 4GB allocated to a single process, the capability of using virtual memory mapping for files that exceed 4GB in size. 64 bits arithmetic also helps some applications, such as cryptographic software, to run twice as fast in some cases. The AMD64 mode doubles the number of SSE registers available enabling, potentially, significant performance enhancement into video codecs and other multimedia applications.

However one might ask himself what’s the impact of using LP64 for a typical C program. Is LP64 the best memory compilation model for AMD64? Will you get a speedup from replacing int (or int32_t) by long (or int64_t) in your code?