Customer Reviews

Inner Loops: A Sourcebook for Fast 32-bit Software Development

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the best book I know of when it comes to learning how to optimize code for maximum performance on an Intel Pentium, Pentium MMX, Pentium Pro, or Pentium II processor. It is also great for learning about how the processors work. Rick gives a very easy to understand explanation of several advanced concepts such as branch prediction, stalls, address generation interlocks, L1 and L2 caches, and instruction pairing. Every little idiosyncrasy and quirk of the Pentium that may slow down your code is explained so that that you can avoid them all. In many cases, Rick gives you a lot more information than any of official Intel documentation. He also corrects several of Intel's timing charts that do not accurately reflect the real world performance of the Pentium processor. Most of this information is understandable and useful even if you program in C or C++. In other words, you don't have to be writing in assembly language to be concerned about branch prediction, cache lines and the other topics covered in the book. This book is a must have for anyone writing performance code on an Pentium processor and recommended to anyone curious about how the Pentium processor works from a software perspective.

If you are an experienced C/C++ programmer who thinks that pointer arithmetic is better than array notation for "performance" reasons, then you better get this book cause the world has passed you by. (See page 155 of Rick's excellent book.)

If you are at all interested in real performance issues and you find yourself making coding decisions like pointer arithmetic or control flow type (while (i--), or while (--i)), then you need to read this book cause its filled with interesting examples of what different things compile to, how long they *should* take, and how long they *really* take.

The only negative I have is that it's a bit old now, and doesn't cover the Pentium II/III. But, much of the Pentium Pro / Pentium information can be extrapolated.

There are so many computer books that have second editions which add little to the original text. This book deserves a second edition by covering;

MMX (when this book was written only the MMX spec from Intel was available, so the author does his best)

SSE & 3DNow! & SSE2 Instructions (SIMD FPU rogramming)

PII, PIII, & Athlon coverage

Encoding / Decoding of Audio and Video Streams

The book is starting to be outdated but I did not find a better book on the subject. Teaches a few assembly tricks to help you get a bit of performance. At least it covers Pentium (only Pentium I and Pentium Pro though). When is the second edition coming out? Unless you are already an advanced assembly programmer, you will learn something in this book.

I found this book to be an invaluable aid in fine tuning my code. Not just for the detailed information about the true performance of the various Intel processors, but also the excellant algorithms for some very common problems. This book needs to be owned by anyone doing serious assembly programming

"Inner Loops" is an excellent book for advanced programmers trying to get the most out of the 486, Pentium, and Pentium Pro. The book primarily targets the plain Pentium, though, and I'd like to see an update covering Pentium II and III. Many of the author's favorite tricks are specifically designed for the Pentium, and actually run slower on the Pentium Pro-core chips, but he does address this issue. There is a nice Pentium Pro section, but the author doesn't clearly explain why certain PPro instruction sequences can seem to execute in zero or negative time, so it seems like plain Pentium was the primary testing platform. Also, the example programs are all DOS-based, which seems curious for a new book, but it didn't get in the way of understanding the examples.

"Inner Loops" is The Book To Have if you're interested in optimized x86 assembly. I know of no other book that covers so completely all the details a programmer needs to write assembly specific to the 486, Pentium, and PPro. Very few details are missing, and even more is here that I could find nowhere else.

This book is divided in 2. The first part describes the theory of assembler optimization for processors from the 486 to the Pentium Pro. 10 years ago, this information was useful but now it is pretty much deprecated as I highly doubt that Pentium optimization techniques do anything good on Athlons or Pentium IV processors. The only chapter that still contains applicable information today is the one providing general advices on optimization such as loop unrolling.

Then the second part named 'Practice' provides concrete examples of assembly optimizations for various problems such as sorting, list and tree traversals. I do not like this section neither because I feel that the presented assembly procedures are thrown at you in the face without showing you the process that the author used to derive them from the original C code. Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book (Special Edition) does a much better job in that area by presenting you 5 versions or more of the same procedure starting from the C version that gets optimized further at each iteration. Also, someone might expect to be able to get the source from the CD-ROM coming with the book and start directly using it. Alas, it is not possible because what the presented code is sorting or searching in binary trees are integers that are directly manipulated in the registers (that is part of the presented optimizations) which has not much reuse value in a world of STL containers holding usually much more complex objects or structures than plain integers. The only value that these examples might have is that they might give you some ideas on where assembly optimization might be applied.

10 years ago, this book would have received a 4 out of 5 stars review but because it is pretty much deprecated except very few pages I am giving it a 2. As I said, a much better book to learn the process of optimizing in assembly is Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book (Special Edition) because it walks you through the optimization process step by step with more than 5 versions of the same procedure that is getting more optimized at each iteration. You will learn how to do it yourself with this book even if it suffers of the same weakness than this book. That is: it presents optimization techniques from the 8088 (that is very very old up!!!) to the Pentium Pro. Another benefit from Abrash book is that, in my opinion, there is a greater chance that you might find its code reusable.

Finally, a very good optimization book that covers optimization techniques for recent processors such as the Athlon and the Pentium IV is: Code Optimization: Effective Memory Usage.

This is an excellent book. A very in-depth explanation of 80x86 assembly language optimization techniques and issues. Also covers C language issues and contains many good examples. I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to write better and faster code - regardless of what language they use.

This is in my opinion one of the better books on programming: Organized perfectly, the content is valid, its easy to read, the author understands the subject matter, and it contains information which is extremely helpful. Its definitely the best book on code optimization I've ever seen by far.