Question

I would like to know if performing a logical right shift is faster when shifting by a power of 2

For example, is

myUnsigned >> 4

any faster than

myUnsigned >> 3

I appreciate that everyone’s first response will be to tell me that one shouldn’t worry about tiny little things like this, it’s using correct algorithms and collections to cut orders of magnitude that matters. I fully agree with you, but I am really trying to squeeze all I can out of an embedded chip (an ATMega328) – I just got a performance shift worthy of a ‘woohoo!’ by replacing a divide with a bit-shift, so I promise you that this does matter.

Answer 1

Let’s look at the datasheet:

http://atmel.com/dyn/resources/prod_documents/8271S.pdf

As far as I can see, the ASR (arithmetic shift right) always shifts by one bit and cannot take the number of bits to shift; it takes one cycle to execute. Therefore, shifting right by n bits will take n cycles. Powers of two behave just the same as any other number.