Argon work, but slow. Beastpoolminer +10%
Cpu-opt 3.8.72
Cpu-opt 3.8.72
There is no AVX targetted code anywhere in cpuminer-opt so there must be some better compiler
generated optimizations possible on Sandybridge vs Westmere. Most HW improvements on Sandybridge
should be transparent to the SW.
The only thing I found was a new instruction encoding format in AVX. Some (many?) of the
legacy SSE instructions have new encoding for AVX and they are possibly faster on a Sandybridge
CPU than the legacy SSE encoding of the same instructions. The new encoding would only be used if compiling
for AVX which would result in different binaries between Westmere SSE4.2 and Sandybridge AVX.
This is somewhat speculative but I can't think of any other reason the AVX compiler switch makes all
the difference.
It looks like I can't kill off the AVX build after all. It will return in th enext release, however, there will still
be no reporting of AVX algo features. AVX may affect some algos or all algos or may affect different algos
differently. They are the ghost optimizations. They exist, their effects can be felt, but they can't be seen.
