Floating point division vs floating point multiplication

Question

Is there any (non-microoptimization) performance gain by coding

float f1 = 200f / 2

in comparision to

float f2 = 200f * 0.5         


        

Answer 1

The answer depends on the platform for which you are programming.

For example, doing lots of multiplication on an array on x86 should be much faster then doing division, because the compiler should create the assembler code which uses SIMD instructions. Since there are no division in the SIMD instructions, then you would see great improvements using multiplication then division.