In my latest post, I explained how you could accelerate 32-bit integer divisions by transforming them into 64-bit floating-point divisions. Indeed, 64-bit floating-point numbers can represent accurately all 32-bit integers on most processors.

It is a strange result: Intel processors seem to do a lot better with floating-point divisions than integer divisions.

Recall the numbers that I got for the throughput of division operations:

64-bit integer division 25 cycles 32-bit integer division (compile-time constant) 2+ cycles 32-bit integer division 8 cycles 32-bit integer division via 64-bit float 4 cycles

I decided to run the same test on a 64-bit ARM processor (AMD A1100):

64-bit integer division 7 ns 32-bit integer division (compile-time constant) 2 ns 32-bit integer division 6 ns 32-bit integer division via 64-bit float 18 ns

These numbers are rough, my benchmark is naive (see code). Still, on this particular ARM processor, 64-bit floating-point divisions are not faster (in throughput) than 32-bit integer divisions. So ARM processors differ from Intel x64 processors quite a bit in this respect.