Illuminating the processor core with LLVM-mca
66 points
3 days ago
| 4 comments
| abseil.io
| HN
KeplerBoy
3 days ago
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Also nicely demonstrated in godbolt's currently ongoing Advent of compiler optimizations series.
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fweimer
3 days ago
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Wouldn't LLVM adjust the models if it is beneficial to its code generation, even if the result less accurately reflects the processor? (I think GCC does that.)
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alain94040
3 days ago
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This is interesting if quite incomplete (as noted in the end conclusion). CPU re-order buffers turn what you think as mostly sequential execution into a massively parallel engine. Data memory access, perfecting, speculative execution, etc. But if you are running a micro-bencmark with a tight loop of millions of iterations, then understanding the pipeline dependencies and dispatching can provide good insights.
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drob518
3 days ago
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Yep. Cache is always the wildcard.
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esbranson
3 days ago
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Too bad they don't support LC-3 or DLX. More my level lol. So begins another deep dive side quest with the chatbot into a tool I didn't even know existed.
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