Answer by user1899861 for Why are elementwise additions much faster in separate loops than in a combined loop?

I cannot replicate the results discussed here.

I don't know if poor benchmark code is to blame, or what, but the two methods are within 10% of each other on my machine using the following code, and one loop is usually just slightly faster than two - as you'd expect.

Array sizes ranged from 2^16 to 2^24, using eight loops. I was careful to initialize the source arrays so the += assignment wasn't asking the FPU to add memory garbage interpreted as a double.

I played around with various schemes, such as putting the assignment of b[j], d[j] to InitToZero[j] inside the loops, and also with using += b[j] = 1 and += d[j] = 1, and I got fairly consistent results.

As you might expect, initializing b and d inside the loop using InitToZero[j] gave the combined approach an advantage, as they were done back-to-back before the assignments to a and c, but still within 10%. Go figure.

Hardware is Dell XPS 8500 with generation 3 Core i7 @ 3.4 GHz and 8 GB memory. For 2^16 to 2^24, using eight loops, the cumulative time was 44.987 and 40.965 respectively. Visual C++ 2010, fully optimized.

PS: I changed the loops to count down to zero, and the combined method was marginally faster. Scratching my head. Note the new array sizing and loop counts.

// MemBufferMystery.cpp : Defines the entry point for the console application.
//
#include "stdafx.h"
#include <iostream>
#include <cmath>
#include <string>
#include <time.h>

#define  dbl    double
#define  MAX_ARRAY_SZ    262145    //16777216    // AKA (2^24)
#define  STEP_SZ           1024    //   65536    // AKA (2^16)

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[]) {
    long i, j, ArraySz = 0,  LoopKnt = 1024;
    time_t start, Cumulative_Combined = 0, Cumulative_Separate = 0;
    dbl *a = NULL, *b = NULL, *c = NULL, *d = NULL, *InitToOnes = NULL;

    a = (dbl *)calloc( MAX_ARRAY_SZ, sizeof(dbl));
    b = (dbl *)calloc( MAX_ARRAY_SZ, sizeof(dbl));
    c = (dbl *)calloc( MAX_ARRAY_SZ, sizeof(dbl));
    d = (dbl *)calloc( MAX_ARRAY_SZ, sizeof(dbl));
    InitToOnes = (dbl *)calloc( MAX_ARRAY_SZ, sizeof(dbl));
    // Initialize array to 1.0 second.
    for(j = 0; j< MAX_ARRAY_SZ; j++) {
        InitToOnes[j] = 1.0;
    }

    // Increase size of arrays and time
    for(ArraySz = STEP_SZ; ArraySz<MAX_ARRAY_SZ; ArraySz += STEP_SZ) {
        a = (dbl *)realloc(a, ArraySz * sizeof(dbl));
        b = (dbl *)realloc(b, ArraySz * sizeof(dbl));
        c = (dbl *)realloc(c, ArraySz * sizeof(dbl));
        d = (dbl *)realloc(d, ArraySz * sizeof(dbl));
        // Outside the timing loop, initialize
        // b and d arrays to 1.0 sec for consistent += performance.
        memcpy((void *)b, (void *)InitToOnes, ArraySz * sizeof(dbl));
        memcpy((void *)d, (void *)InitToOnes, ArraySz * sizeof(dbl));

        start = clock();
        for(i = LoopKnt; i; i--) {
            for(j = ArraySz; j; j--) {
                a[j] += b[j];
                c[j] += d[j];
            }
        }
        Cumulative_Combined += (clock()-start);
        printf("\n %6i miliseconds for combined array sizes %i and %i loops",
                (int)(clock()-start), ArraySz, LoopKnt);
        start = clock();
        for(i = LoopKnt; i; i--) {
            for(j = ArraySz; j; j--) {
                a[j] += b[j];
            }
            for(j = ArraySz; j; j--) {
                c[j] += d[j];
            }
        }
        Cumulative_Separate += (clock()-start);
        printf("\n %6i miliseconds for separate array sizes %i and %i loops \n",
                (int)(clock()-start), ArraySz, LoopKnt);
    }
    printf("\n Cumulative combined array processing took %10.3f seconds",
            (dbl)(Cumulative_Combined/(dbl)CLOCKS_PER_SEC));
    printf("\n Cumulative seperate array processing took %10.3f seconds",
        (dbl)(Cumulative_Separate/(dbl)CLOCKS_PER_SEC));
    getchar();

    free(a); free(b); free(c); free(d); free(InitToOnes);
    return 0;
}

I'm not sure why it was decided that MFLOPS was a relevant metric. I though the idea was to focus on memory accesses, so I tried to minimize the amount of floating point computation time. I left in the +=, but I am not sure why.

A straight assignment with no computation would be a cleaner test of memory access time and would create a test that is uniform irrespective of the loop count. Maybe I missed something in the conversation, but it is worth thinking twice about. If the plus is left out of the assignment, the cumulative time is almost identical at 31 seconds each.