[cfe-dev] [RFC] FP Contract = fast?

[Hal Finkel via cfe-dev]

On 03/15/2017 08:27 AM, Renato Golin wrote:

> Folks,
>
> I've been asking around people about the state of FP contract, which
> seems to be "on" but it's not really behaving like it, at least not as
> I would expect:
>
> int foo(float a, float b, float c) { return a*b+c; }
>
> $ clang -target aarch64-linux-gnu -O2 -S fma.c -ffp-contract=on -o -
> (...)
> fmul s0, s0, s1
> fadd s0, s0, s2
> (...)

When you reverted  r282259 in 282289, you also reverted the functional 
fix to make the command-line option actually work. Right now it is 
broken. Regardless of what else we do, we should fix this (we should 
probably recommit r282259, with the default flipped, to pick up the 
fixes). If you were to change your source file to:

#pragma STDC FP_CONTRACT ON
int foo(float a, float b, float c) { return a*b+c; }

Then running:

$ clang -target aarch64-linux-gnu -O2 -S fma.c -ffp-contract=on -o -
(...)
fmadd    s0, s0, s1, s2
(...)

>
> $ clang -target aarch64-linux-gnu -O2 -S fma.c -ffp-contract=fast -o -
> (...)
> fmadd s0, s0, s1, s2
> (...)
>
> I'm not sure this works in Fortran either, but defaulting to "on" when
> (I believe) the language should allow contraction and not doing it is
> not a good default.
>
> i haven't worked out what would be necessary to make it work on a
> case-by-case basis (what kinds of fusions does C allow?) to make sure
> we don't do all or nothing, but if we don't want to start that
> conversation now, then I'd recommend we just turn it all the way to 11
> (like GCC) and let people turn it off if they really mean it.
>
> The rationale is that:
>
> * Contracted operations increase precision (less rounding steps)
> * It performs equal or faster on all architectures I know (true everywhere?)
> * Users already expect that (certainly, GCC users do)
> * Makes us look good on benchmarks :)
>
> A recent SPEC2k6 comparison Linaro did for AArch64, enabling
> -ffp-contract=fast took the edge of GCC in a number of cases and in
> some of them made them comparable in performance. So, any reasons not
> to?
>
> If we go with it, we need to first finish the job that Sebastian was
> dong on the test-suite, then just turn it on by default. A second
> stage would be to add tests/benchmarks that explicitly test FP
> precision, so that we have some extra guarantee that we're doing the
> right thing.
>
> Opinions?

I'm certainly in favor of this plan. My users generally find our current 
defaults confusing because it differs from all of our other compilers 
(GCC and vendor compilers), plus it gives poor performance.

Thanks again,
Hal

>
> cheers,
> --renato

-- 
Hal Finkel
Lead, Compiler Technology and Programming Languages
Leadership Computing Facility
Argonne National Laboratory