4 ms·

Reg-Reg MOV doesn't use an ALU, though. It would be interesting to see if the Intel C Compiler knows about this false dependency.

• nkurz 12y ago
  'icpc' (the Intel C++ compiler) has equal performance for both of the test cases, and it did choose to use different registers for each call. But it's not clear if that's by design or by chance. In some ways, that's the boring part. The interesting part (to me) is that both tests are much faster than either version with g++. Here's icpc 14.0.3 vs g++ 4.8.1 on a Sandy Bridge E5-1620 @ 3.60GHz and a Haswell i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GHz. nate@sandybridge:~/tmp$ g++ -O3 -march=native -std=c++11 popcnt-dependency.cpp -o popcnt-dependency nate@sandybridge:~/tmp$ popcnt-dependency 1 unsigned 41959360000 0.608615 sec 17.2289 GB/s uint64_t 41959360000 0.82312 sec 12.739 GB/s nate@sandybridge:~/tmp$ icpc -O3 -march=native -std=c++11 popcnt-dependency.cpp -o popcnt-dependency nate@sandybridge:~/tmp$ popcnt-dependency 1 unsigned 41959360000 0.182781 sec 57.3679 GB/s uint64_t 41959360000 0.182638 sec 57.4128 GB/s nate@haswell:~/tmp$ g++ -O3 -march=native -std=c++11 popcnt-dependency.cpp -o popcnt-dependency nate@haswell:~/tmp$ popcnt-dependency 1 unsigned 41959360000 0.401225 sec 26.1343 GB/s uint64_t 41959360000 0.75841 sec 13.826 GB/s nate@haswell:~/tmp$ icpc -O3 -march=native -std=c++11 popcnt-dependency.cpp -o popcnt-dependency nate@haswell:~/tmp$ popcnt-dependency 1 unsigned 41959360000 0.0843861 sec 124.259 GB/s uint64_t 41959360000 0.0842836 sec 124.41 GB/s That would be incredible if true! But I think it's a bug, since the inner loop looks far too short and doesn't seem to be repeating the popcnt's. I'm not sure yet if it's a problem with the compiler or if the test case is abusing something undefined.
  • nkurz 12y ago
    OK, it looks like 'icpc' has decided that it would be fastest to invert the two loops: popcnt() once, then repeat the addition 10000 times. I'm neither a language lawyer nor a friend of C++, so I'll refrain to trying to decide whether this is a legal optimization. But a liberal sprinkling of 'volatile' makes it do what was obviously intended. After this, the speeds are more comparable, although 'icpc' retains a small (but much more plausible) lead: nate@sandybridge:~/tmp$ popcnt-dependency 1 unsigned 41959360000 0.517827 sec 20.2495 GB/s uint64_t 41959360000 0.518041 sec 20.2412 GB/s nate@haswell:~/tmp$ popcnt-dependency 1 unsigned 41959360000 0.351273 sec 29.8507 GB/s uint64_t 41959360000 0.352914 sec 29.712 GB/s The other test I did was checking what Intel's IACA (a wonderful optimization tool that you really should be using if you are not already) thought about the g++ loop. It did _not_ notice the false dependency, and said the loops should take the same amount of time. Do this suggest that the Intel compiler is just getting lucky, or that Intel doesn't have great internal communication between teams?
    • caf 12y ago
      It's definitely legal, the buffer is created with operator new and is not made visible to any other code, so the compiler knows that it can't change within the loop.
    • floody-berry 12y ago
      That's the problem with microbenchmarks, ensuring they're measuring what you think they're measuring.