[llvm] r207301 - [X86] Implement TargetLowering::getScalingFactorCost hook.

[Chandler Carruth]

On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 7:11 PM, Quentin Colombet <qcolombet at apple.com>wrote:

> What allocation means here (on a second thought that is not super clear)
> is the number of ports an instruction uses.
>

This is a fine explanation. =] It would be good to put it into the x86
implementation of getScalingFactor, maybe with examples?


>
> Regarding the benchmarks, the numbers are unchanged on the llvm test suite
> + specs.
>
> In fact, this commit is just the first step toward performance
> improvements. Indeed, this hook is not yet sufficient to make LSR to prefer
> the addressing mode of the form 'reg'  compared to those of the form 'reg1
> + reg2 * scale'.
> Indeed, currently we still prefer 'reg1 + reg2 * scale' to 'reg', in many
> cases and in particular with scale = 1, which is wrong performance wise. I
> am working on fixing this.
>

Makes sense.


>
> With my current prototype, I see up to 30% speed up on small kernels.
>

Cool.

My only concern are the cases where not doing the scale requires more
instructions. In particular, I have seen a lot of performance problems in
the past[1] which stemmed essentially from using lea to do address
computations so that the addressing mode operand was simpler. Just want to
make sure the LSR and other users of this will be sufficiently conservative.

[1]: So fun story here. The fact that LLVM so aggressively forms complex
addressing modes may explain why this used to be such a big problem for me.
It would use every single part of the addressing mode in structuring the
loop body, and then during instruction selection we would fail in a large
number of cases to match that as an actual addressing mode. I spent a bunch
of time teaching the instruction selection layer for x86 to re-constitute
every addressing mode it could in order to fix this. This may even become
relevant, because while I *tried* to only do these heroics for cases that
were strictly better (ie, fewer instructions total), I could have messed it
up, and we might re-form complex addressing modes even when unnecessary.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-commits/attachments/20140425/ead0b7b9/attachment.html>