Chandler Carruth
2014-Oct-01 01:00 UTC
[LLVMdev] Heads up! New x86 vector shuffle lowering becoming the default!
Greetings folks! After numerous rounds of benchmarks and lots of fixes, I think the new x86 vector shuffle lowering code path is ready to be enabled by default. I plan to update the test cases and flip the switch as soon as the patches are written. We have had *significant* benchmarking at this point. I have no benchmarks which regress by a very significant margin (over 5%) and the improvements over all outstrip the regressions for all the micro-architectures I have benchmarked. This includes both some internal benchmarks I have, but more importantly LNT.>From what I can tell, AMD chips will see an *extremely* significantimprovement when using older SSE versions. If you're build only uses SSE3 or older, this should help a lot. Even when using newer ISA extensions, you should see quite significant improvements. Even on Intel chips I'm seeing very significant improvements for SSE3 and SSE2. I'm also seeing some very small gains for modern ISAs, but mostly its in the noise. The primary difference is that the new lowering takes systematic approach to decomposing the shuffle into components which have efficient instruction sequences. As a consequence, at no point does it "fall back" to scalarizing code the way the old lowering did. It also works very hard to minimize domain crossing traffic which can have unexpectedly large penalties for real world code. If you're seeing performance regressions because of this switch, it should actually be quite a bit easier to add code to the new logic to handle your cases better. Patches welcome! Correctness testing has been done by building LNT, bootstrap, and a bunch of other large code bases with the new code path. But I have also written (and committed) a fuzz tester for vector shuffles. Using that I have correctness tested everything up through AVX-512 (thanks to the Intel SDE). I have spent significant CPU cycles testing up through AVX2 with well over 2 million fuzz tests without any failures detected. For comparison, the current default code path has several crashers and miscompiles found after 1 million fuzz tests. Thanks! -Chandler -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20140930/c4fe4882/attachment.html>