Do low-level optimizations matter? Faster quicksort with cmov (2020)
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HN comment orderA correction to the history mentioned in the article: CMOV has not been added by AMD around 2000. CMOV has been added by Intel in 1995, to Pentium Pro. It was the most important addition to the x86 ISA added by Pentium Pro. So CMOV was supported by Pentium Pro and its successors, like Pentium 2 or Pentium III, but it was not supported by Pentium, Pentium with MMX or AMD K6 CPUs. AMD has added CMOV starting with Athlon…
This article is missing the important reference to the prior work by Edelkamp and Weiss, on branchless quicksort [1]. I've long since implemented that in pdqsort [2], along with other techniques described by me in [3] which is a drop-in replacement for std::sort that's ~twice as fast as std::sort for small data with branchless comparisons. It's also available in Boost.sort [4]. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.06697 [2] https://github.com/orlp/pdqsort [3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.05123 [4]…
(2020) Popular in: 2021 (134 points, 62 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27863689 2024 (174 points, 75 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41314039
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 329
- Total comments
- 138
100+ points or 50+ comments
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reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-08-26 | Do Low-Level Optimizations Matter? (2020) | eklitzke | 2 | 0 |
| 2021-03-04 | Do low level optimizations matter? | pilom | 15 | 0 |
| 2021-07-16 | Do Low-level Optimizations Matter? (2020) | todsacerdoti | 1 | 0 |
| 2021-07-17 | Do Low-Level Optimizations Matter? (2020)First breakout | signa11 | 134 | 62 |
| 2024-08-21 | Do low-level optimizations matter? Faster quicksort with cmov (2020)Best thread · Latest 20+ point return | fanf2 | 174 | 75 |
| 2025-11-20 | Do low-level optimizations matter? | fanf2 | 3 | 1 |