site: travisdowns.github.io
Ice Lake Store Elimination
https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2020/05/18/icelake-zero-opt.html [travisdowns.github.io]
2020-05-18 20:25
tags:
benchmark
cpu
investigation
perf
systems
We have found that the store elimination optimization originally uncovered on Skylake client is still present in Ice Lake and is roughly twice as effective in our fill benchmarks. Elimination of 96% L2 writebacks (to L3) and L3 writebacks (to RAM) was observed, compared to 50% to 60% on Skylake. We found speedups of up to 45% in the L3 region and speedups of about 25% in RAM, compared to improvements of less than 20% in Skylake.
But there’s a lot of investigation work to get there.
source: HN
Gathering Intel on Intel AVX-512 Transitions
https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2020/01/17/avxfreq1.html [travisdowns.github.io]
2020-01-17 22:19
tags:
benchmark
cpu
investigation
perf
programming
This is a post about AVX and AVX-512 related frequency scaling. Now, something more than nothing has been written about this already, including cautionary tales of performance loss and some broad guidelines, so do we really need to add to the pile?
Perhaps not, but I’m doing it anyway. My angle is a lower level look, almost microscopic really, at the specific transition behaviors. One would hope that this will lead to specific, quantitative advice about exactly when various instruction types are likely to pay off, but (spoiler) I didn’t make it there in this post.
source: HN
Clang format tanks performance
https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2019/11/19/toupper.html [travisdowns.github.io]
2019-11-19 22:54
tags:
benchmark
c
cxx
perf
programming
turtles
Let’s benchmark toupper implementations.
Actually, I don’t really care about toupper much at all, but I was writing a different post and needed a peg to hang my narrative hat on, and hey toupper seems like a nice harmless benchmark. Despite my effort to choose something which should be totally straightforward and not sidetrack me, this weird thing popped out.
source: L
Where do interrupts happen?
https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2019/08/20/interrupts.html [travisdowns.github.io]
2019-08-21 17:39
tags:
cpu
hardware
investigation
systems
For a simple 1-wide in-order, non-pipelined CPU the answer might be as simple as: the CPU is interrupted either before or after instruction that is currently running2. For anything more complicated it’s not going to be easy. On a modern out-of-order processor there may be hundreds of instructions in-flight at any time, some waiting to execute, a dozen or more currently executing, and others waiting to retire. From all these choices, which instruction will be chosen as the victim?
source: L
What has your microcode done for you lately?
https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2019/03/19/random-writes-and-microcode-oh-my.html [travisdowns.github.io]
2019-03-30 03:26
tags:
benchmark
best
cpu
investigation
perf
programming
systems
Did you ever wonder what is inside those microcode updates that get silently applied to your CPU via Windows update, BIOS upgrades, and various microcode packages on Linux? Well, you are in the wrong place, because this blog post won’t answer that question (you might like this though).
In fact, the overwhelming majority of this this post is about the performance of scattered writes, and not very much at all about the details of CPU microcode. Where the microcode comes in, and what might make this more interesting than usual, is that performance on a purely CPU-bound benchmark can vary dramatically depending on microcode version. In particular, we will show that the most recent Intel microcode version can significantly slow down a store heavy workload when some stores hit in the L1 data cache, and some miss.
Very thorough.