[LLVMdev] Lowering to MMX

[Nicolas Capens]

Hi all,

I'm working on a graphics project which uses LLVM for dynamic code 
generation, and I noticed a major performance regression when upgrading 
from LLVM 2.8 to 3.0-rc1 (LLVM 2.9 didn't support Win64 so I skipped it 
entirely).

I found out that the performance regression is due to removing support 
for lowering 64-bit vector operations to MMX, and using SSE2 instead. My 
code uses a mix of MMX intrinsics and v4i16 operations, so it ping-pongs 
back and forth between MMX and SSE2 instructions in the generated code.

To get more optimal code, I see three options, and I was wondering if 
someone could share some advice on which approach you think will work best:
1) I could use v8i16 or v4i32 instead of v4i16, but then the SSE 
register pressure would be significantly increased. I already use v4f32 
operations intensively so having the MMX registers available for 64-bit 
integer vector operations helps performance quite considerably on the 
register deprived x86 architecture. There's little to no opportunity for 
using v8i16 to perform two v4i16 operations simultaneously so that won't 
make up for the added register pressure. So I'm not keen to implement 
this option, unless anyone sees some advantages that I missed?
2) Since I use MMX intrinsics, I take care of inserting the appropriate 
EMMS instructions myself as well. So it's absolutely fine to have LLVM 
lower 64-bit operations into MMX instructions (the way it used to be in 
LLVM 2.8). Would it be straightforward to re-enable this? I noticed that 
revision 115243 removes the MMX lowering rules, but I don't know if the 
rest of LLVM 3.0 would still support them if I simply reverted them. 
Please note that I'm not an LLVM expert and I'd prefer not having to 
maintain local changes. Would there be any objection to having an 
'EnableMMX' flag (false by default)?
3) I believe all MMX instructions are available as intrinsics now? That 
would allow me to replace all straight LLVM operations with intrinsics. 
I'm just wondering what the downsides of that would be? I assume I won't 
get any benefits from instruction combining, but things like dead code 
elimination still work?

Thank you for your time.

Cheers,
Nicolas