[Beowulf] Re: vectors vs. loops

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 03:03:51PM -0400, Robert G. Brown wrote:
> On Wed, 4 May 2005, Eugen Leitl wrote:

> > There are tricks to optimize available memory bandwidth on modern x86
> > architectures though, as described in
> > 
> > http://leitl.org/docs/comp/AMD_block_prefetch_paper.pdf
> > 
> > (and far more in http://leitl.org/docs/comp/AMD64softoptguide.pdf ).
> 
> Awesome documents -- very informative!  I'm saving copies for my own

Thanks! That's the reason I mirrored them.

> edification (presuming that is permitted by their respective licenses).

These are freely available whitepapers and manuals from AMD. I haven't seen
any license restricting their use. 
 
> Do you have any idea how the "fully optimized loops" in the example code
> compare timewise to gcc results for obvious implementations of the same
> loops, or ditto for other compilers?  How necessary is it for us to

I don't recall whether they posted all the benchmarks, but IIRC the pure C
variant doesn't give the 300% (vs naive) boost, as the compiler doesn't
generate the required (MOVNTQ?) instruction.

> start inlining assembler in order to get a threefold improvement in
> effective throughput in a straightforward core loop?  Do compilers

I think you have to use assembler inline for the full speed bost.

> automatically use block prefetch and three phase implementations of the
> floating point involved?

Given that gcc 4.0 is ante portas, things might have changed in the respect.

If you do benchmarks, can you please post full numbers?

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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