Hello,
I am seeing suboptimal performance of the following loop compiled with
gcc (4.7.3 and 4.4.7, Ubuntu):
for(i=0; i<NSIZE; i++){
a[i] += b[i];
c[i] += d[i];
}
Arrays are dynamically allocated and aligned to page boundary, declared
with __restrict__ and __attribute__((aligned(32))). I am running on
Intel i7-2620M (Sandy Bridge).
The problem is IMHO related to '4k aliasing'. It happens for the most
common case of a/b/c/d starting at page boundary (e.g., natural result
of malloc). To demonstrate, here is the assembly generated with 'gcc
-mtune=native -mavx -O3':
.L8:
vmovapd (%rdx,%rdi), %ymm0 #1 load b
addq $1, %r8 #2
vaddpd (%rcx,%rdi), %ymm0, %ymm0 #3 load a and add
vmovapd %ymm0, (%rdx,%rdi) #4 store a
vmovapd (%rax,%rdi), %ymm0 #5 load d
vaddpd (%rsi,%rdi), %ymm0, %ymm0 #6 load c and add
vmovapd %ymm0, (%rax,%rdi) #7 store c
addq $32, %rdi #8
cmpq %r8, %r12 #9
ja .L8 #10
The 4k aliasing problem is caused by lines 4 and 5 (writing result to
array a and reading data from either c or d). From my tests this seems
to be the default behavior for both AVX and SSE2 instruction sets, and
for both vectorized and non-vectorized cases.
It is easy to fix the problem by placing the two writes together, at the
end of the iteration, e.g.:
.L8:
vmovapd (%rdx,%rdi), %ymm1 #1
addq $1, %r8 #2
vaddpd (%rcx,%rdi), %ymm1, %ymm1 #3
vmovapd (%rax,%rdi), %ymm0 #4
vaddpd (%rsi,%rdi), %ymm0, %ymm0 #5
vmovapd %ymm1, (%rdx,%rdi) #6
vmovapd %ymm0, (%rax,%rdi) #7
addq $32, %rdi #8
cmpq %r8, %r12 #9
ja .L8 #10
In this case the writes happen after all the loads. The above code is
(almost) what ICC generates for this case. For problem sizes small
enough to fit in L1 the speedup is roughly 50%.
I would like to know if this can be considered a 'performance bug' to be
reported, or (most likely..) there is a reason for this behavior that I
am not aware of? If so, can you suggest how can I write optimal C code
without resorting to intrinsics, or changing alignment of the data?
Thank you!
Marcin
