1.) I can provide the codez. I'll add a link to the article.

2.) Yeah. If you read the article, it reproduces on 64bit code, too.

3.) Not true. Try gcc (Debian 4.3.2-1.1) 4.3.2. The version I mentioned that I used in my post.

4.) etc

5.) Read the article.

I'll add some more shit and reply to you again when its online. I need to eat breakfast and head to the office but I'll make you happy soon.

He was perfectly calm. No need for that. Let's keep things polite here.

and

testing harness, scripts to build it, and to run it: http://gist.github.com/483524 -- yes i was too lazy to make a makefile.

you will still need to construct some command line fu to separate the results into separate files so you can load it into whatever maths program you want.

Your microbenchmark appears to be alignment sensitive. With your assembly code on my machine (quad-core 2.66 Core2 Quad) running for 250 tests I get:

  test1 usecs: avg 1.16759e+06 stddev 13917.6
  test2 usecs: avg 1.31382e+06 stddev 405.725

But if you add .align 8 right before the definition of test2 in the assembly file (i.e. make it be 8-byte aligned, just like test1), I get the following numbers:

  test1 usecs: avg 1.15972e+06 stddev 17004
  test2 usecs: avg 1.1264e+06 stddev 754.44

Additionally, if I simply modify your testcase to use 16-byte alignment, rather than 8-byte alignment, I get the following numbers:

  test1 usecs: avg 1.15895e+06 stddev 15764.7
  test2 usecs: avg 1.12657e+06 stddev 941.606

You can see the assembly sources I used: http://gist.github.com/483840

FWIW, the code that uses movs rather than pushes and pops ought to be faster since (generally speaking for larger prologues and epilogues) you can execute a series of movs in parallel, whereas your pushes and pops are serialized, since they're all updating a common resource (the stack pointer). Empirical testing on benchmarks like SPEC2k has borne this out, both on x86 and x86-64. (You ought to be able to see this effect with gcc, depending on what cpu you use for the -mtune switch.) As you noted, this strategy carries a size penalty, since movs are somewhat larger than pushes and pops.

I'll also note that on my machine, with gcc saying it's:

  @nightcrawler:~$ gcc --version
  gcc (Ubuntu 4.4.3-4ubuntu5) 4.4.3

  @nightcrawler:~$ gcc-4.3 --version
  gcc-4.3 (Ubuntu 4.3.4-10ubuntu1) 4.3.4

  @nightcrawler:~$ ssh henry7 gcc --version
  gcc (GCC) 4.2.4 (Ubuntu 4.2.4-1ubuntu4)

  @nightcrawler:~$ ssh henry7 /usr/local/tools/gcc-4.3.3/bin/i686-pc-linux-gnu-gcc --version
  i686-pc-linux-gnu-gcc (Sourcery G++ 4.3-83) 4.3.2

EDIT: formatting fixes.