>> I find it quite scary how they can constantly gain 2x speedups. Every 
>> time they change something, it goes another 2x or 4x faster. You would 
>> think that there would be a physical limit to how fast it can possibly 
>> go, but no, it keeps getting faster without end. Hmm...
> 
> Yeh, it makes you realise that just because you think you have some 
> "fast" C code, there is probably still some big speedups to be made.

I find it particularly disturbing that merely changing the order in 
which the bytes reside in memory produces a 50x speedup. This 
practically guarantees that no high-level programming language can ever 
be fast. It means that abstraction and maintainability will forever be 
the enemies of performance and efficiency.

Also... It's an 8-core server, but parallel processing gives only a 3.5x 
speedup? That's pretty interesting. ;-)

Question: How much faster does this go on the GPU? [I'm going to stick 
my neck out and say it'd take longer to transfer the data to the GPU 
than to actually do the calculation.] Do any current GPUs support 
double-precision yet?

> Next assignment, do the same activity on the inverse matrix function :-)

Hehehe, yeah... I'm guessing that's going to be a tad slower. ;-)

>> Just for giggles, I could implement this in Haskell and see how many 
>> million times slower it is.
> 
> I wonder if it would finish in one day? :-)

Well, the initial version took "only" 5 hours on a dual quad-Xeon 3.15 
GHz server. How slow can it possibly be on my ancient 32-bit single-core 
AMD Athlon 1700+ 1.5 GHz? :-P

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