On Mar 24, 2005, at 6:59 AM, Bill Northcott wrote:
PS This discussion has given me another thought. On MacOS X, it would be much faster to use floats instead of doubles because they can be directly processed by the Altivec section of the CPU. I can see no way to have R use floats. Would that be possible as a future enhancement or is it just too hard?
To have just a rough idea about how "much faster" this would be, here are some timings for 2000 runs of 1000x1000 matrix-vector multiplications using vecLib's BLAS:
G5 1.8GHz
sgemv: 2.9s
dgemv: 6.7s
G4 1.5GHz sgemv: 10.1s dgemv: 17.3s
The performance difference between double and float is actually less astonishing (although is proves that altiVec is used - still) than the G4 vs G5 comparison. vecLib for G5 seems to be fairly well optimized and the G5 architecture seems to have better throughput.
Anyway, I'm not quite sure switching from doubles to floats yields big enough speed up to justify the effort. Maybe some Lapack test would helpful, too, to have a bigger picture of this.
Cheers, Simon
PS: I'd rather move this part to R-SIG-Mac as this is actually a Mac- only question.
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