When Watcom International revamped its C/C++ compilers to take advantage of the Pentium's superscalar architecture, the company got an unintended bonus: integer code that executes substantially faster on 486s. Even though the 486 doesn't have a true superscalar architecture like the Pentium, its pipeline stages can overlap a lot more than Watcom's 486 code could achieve. "Two years ago, we introduced 486 optimizations, and I think the performance benefit was about 5 percent," says Dave Boswell, Watcom's vice president of marketing and sales. "We thought we were really doing something swell. But with Pentium optimizations, we got an average of 30 percent to 40 percent improvement on a 486."
Flexible C++
Matthew Wilson
My approach to software engineering is far more pragmatic than it
is
theoretical--and no language better exemplifies this than C++.
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Pentium Optimizations
