[LLVMdev] Simplifying selects + arm stuff

[Chris Lattner]

On Nov 12, 2010, at 11:04 AM, Evan Cheng wrote:
>> %z = select i1 %cond, i32 -1, i32 %x
>> %s = and i32 %z, %y
>> 
>> Is a "conditional and".  It would be interesting to know if the ARM backend gets this as a single predicated 'and' instruction (similarly for the 'or' and 'xor' version of these patterns).  I bet not, which is bad if instcombine is canonicalizing this way.
> 
> On ARM, an instruction predicated on false predicate is still executed so it's frequently undesirable. Because llvm canonicalize to select instruction, it already generates significantly more predicated instructions than gcc. We have seen some regressions due to overly aggressive select formation.
> 
> By definition select requires both source operands to be evaluated. Given how good branch predicators are these days, I'm not surprised it often turns branching code performs better. ICC also almost never generates conditional moves.

That may be, but I can't imagine that:

$ cat t.ll
define i32 @test(i32 %a, i32 %b, i32 %x, i32 %y) nounwind {
%cond = icmp slt i32 %a, %b
%z = select i1 %cond, i32 -1, i32 %x
%s = and i32 %z, %y
 ret i32 %s
}
$ llc t.ll -o - -march=arm 
_test:                                  @ @test
@ BB#0:
	cmp	r0, r1
	mvn	r12, #0
	movlt	r2, r12
	and	r0, r2, r3
	bx	lr

is better than a cmp + conditional and + bx.

-Chris