Re: Linus' sha1 is much faster!

[Linus Torvalds]

On Mon, 17 Aug 2009, Steven Noonan wrote:
> 
> Interesting. I compared Linus' implementation to the public domain one
> by Steve Reid[1]

You _really_ need to talk about what kind of environment you have.

There are three major issues:
 - Netburst vs non-netburst
 - 32-bit vs 64-bit
 - compiler version

Steve Reid's code looks great, but the way it is coded, gcc makes a mess 
of it, which is exactly what my SHA1 tries to avoid.

[ In contrast, gcc does very well on just about _any_ straightforward 
  unrolled SHA1 C code if the target architecture is something like PPC or 
  ia64 that has enough registers to keep it all in registers.

  I haven't really tested other compilers - a less aggressive compiler 
  would actually do _better_ on SHA1, because the problem with gcc is that 
  it turns the whole temporary 16-entry word array into register accesses, 
  and tries to do register allocation on that _array_.

  That is wonderful for the above-mentioned PPC and IA64, but it makes gcc 
  create totally crazy code when there aren't enough registers, and then 
  gcc starts spilling randomly (ie it starts spilling a-e etc). This is 
  why the compiler and version matters so much. ]

> (average of 5 runs)
> Linus' sha1: 283MB/s
> Steve Reid's sha1: 305MB/s

So I get very different results:

        #             TIME[s] SPEED[MB/s]
        Reid            2.742       222.6
        linus           1.464         417

this is Intel Nehalem, but compiled for 32-bit mode (which is the more 
challenging one because x86-32 only has 7 general-purpose registers), and 
with gcc-4.4.0.

                        Linus