On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 2:03 PM, Stephen J. Butler
<[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Luke the Hiesterman <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
>> Would it really be that much faster? I don't know exactly how pow() is
>> implemented, but I assume it's basically just a loop of multiplications, in
>> which case it would basically be the same as x*x in this case, since it
>> would exit after the first iteration....
>
> I scanned through, and while there are some simple cases these
> implementations check for, it doesn't appear x^2 is one of them. So
> pow(x,2) is likely to be much slower than x*x.

Oops... I didn't look far enough! Down a ways is this code:

    //if y is an integer, less than 2**16, do iPow
    if( 0 == yFracBits && fabsy <= 0x1.0p16f )
    {
        int32_t iy = y; //should be exact
        int32_t yIsNeg = iy >> 31;
        iy = abs( iy );

        double dx = x;
        double result = iy & 1 ? dx : 1.0;

        while( iy >>= 1 )
        {
            dx *= dx;
            if( iy & 1 )
                result *= dx;
        }

        //We are using double precision here, so we don't need to
worry about range differences between tiny vs huge numbers for
negative Y
        if( yIsNeg )
            return (float) (1.0 / result);

        return (float) result;
    }

So it won't be much slower, but just a little slower (function call
overhead, plus all the work to get to this point).
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