Bit Twiddling abs() with GCC

Recently on Reddit there was a link to a page which listed a lot of clever “bit twiddling” hacks. I decided to try the hack for computing abs() against the standard library function and the naive implementation:

/* Clever version */
static inline int32_t
abs_1(int32_t v)
{
    const int32_t m = v >> sizeof(int32_t) * 8 - 1;
    return (v ^ m) - m;
}

/* Naive version */
static inline int32_t
abs_2(int32_t v)
{
    return v < 0 ? -v : v;
}

Compiling with gcc -O3 produces exactly the same code for all three versions!

  c1 fa 1f    sar    $0x1f,%edx
  31 d0       xor    %edx,%eax
  29 d0       sub    %edx,%eax

If I also specify -march=athlon-xp to optimize for my processor, the sar instruction is replaced with cltd (also known as cdq).

  99          cltd
  31 d0       xor    %edx,%eax
  29 d0       sub    %edx,%eax

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