Agner on Optimisation #

I highly recomend Agner’s Optimization manuals to people curious about optimizing for x86.

It’s an exhaustive review of userspace performance of C, C++ and Assembly code. The author collected an impresive amount of information, structured it and put it in a set of 5 free PDFs.

It features original research, like reverse engineered branch prediction algorithm for various CPUs and optimisation performed by various compilers. It also provides high-level guidance on how to design fast C++.

Topic covered include:

• ABIs
• Branch prediction algorithms
• Cache behaviour
• Executable file formats (ELF, PXE, Mach-O)
• Memory mapping
• Microcode