[LLVMdev] How do I model MUL with multiply-accumulate instruction?

Greg McGary greg at mcgary.org
Tue Apr 21 17:21:27 PDT 2009


Evan Cheng wrote:
> On Apr 16, 2009, at 2:19 PM, Greg McGary wrote:
>
>   
>> The only multiplication instruction on my target CPU is
>> multiply-and-accumulate.  The result goes into a special register that
>> can destructively read at the end of a sequence of multiply-adds.  The
>> following sequence is required to so a simple multiply:
>>
>>    acc r0   # clear accumulator, discarding its value (r0 reads as 0,
>> and sinks writes)
>>    mac rSRC1, rSRC2   # multiply sources, store result in accumulator
>>    acc rDEST   # fetch accumulator value to rDEST
>>
>> What's the best way to model simple MUL as this 3-insn sequence in the
>> LLVM backend?
>>
>> Should the internal accumulation register be explicitly modeled as its
>> own register class with a pattern to copy its value to a general  
>> register?
>>
>> Is it possible to code the three insn sequence in TableGen alone, or
>> must I resort to custom C++ code?
>>     
>
> Probably c++ code. You want to lower it into the target node followed  
> by a copyfromreg from the accumulator to a virtual register.
>   

Can I model the accumulator register as reset-on-read in LLVM?  For GCC, 
this
would abstractly be (parallel [(set result accum) (set accum 0)]).  
Naive code for
a sequence of muls { c = a * b;  f = d * e; } is this:

    acc r0
    mul rA, rB
    acc rC
    acc r0    ### redundant
    mul rD, rE
    acc rF

If I can't inform LLVM of the side-effect of zeroing accum when it is 
read, then
do I need to write a target-specific pass, or is there some 
easier/general way?

G




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