[LLVMdev] instcombine does silly things with vector x+x

[Chris Lattner]

On Oct 28, 2011, at 2:13 PM, andrew adams wrote:

> Consider the following function which doubles a <16 x i8> vector:
> 
> define <16 x i8> @test(<16 x i8> %a) {
>       %b = add <16 x i8> %a, %a
>       ret <16 x i8> %b
> }
> 
> If I compile it for x86 with llc like so:
> 
> llc paddb.ll -filetype=asm -o=/dev/stdout
> 
> I get a two-op function that just does paddb %xmm0 %xmm0 and then
> returns. llc does this regardless of the optimization level. Great!
> 
> If I let the instcombine pass touch it like so:
> 
> opt -instcombine paddb.ll |  llc -filetype=asm -o=/dev/stdout
> 
> or like so:
> 
> opt -O3 paddb.ll |  llc -filetype=asm -o=/dev/stdout
> 
> then the add gets converted to a vector left shift by 1, which then
> lowers to a much slower function with about a hundred ops. No amount
> of optimization after the fact will simplify it back to paddy.

This sounds like a really serious X86 backend performance bug.  Canonicalizing "x+x" to a shift is the "right thing to do", the backend should match it. 

-Chris

> 
> I'm actually generating these ops in a JIT context, and I want to use
> instcombine, as it seems like a useful pass. Any idea how I can
> reliably generate the 128-bit sse version of paddb? I thought I might
> be able to force the issue with an intrinsic, but there only seems to
> be an intrinsic for the 64 bit version (llvm.x86.mmx.padd.b), and the
> saturating 128 bit version (llvm.x86.sse2.padds.b). I would just give
> up and use inline assembly, but it seems I can't JIT that.
> 
> I'm using the latest llvm 3.1 from svn. I get similar behavior at
> llvm.org/demo using the following equivalent C code:
> 
> #include <emmintrin.h>
> __m128i f(__m128i a) {
>  return _mm_add_epi8(a, a);
> }
> 
> The no-optimization compilation of this is better than the optimized version.
> 
> Any ideas? Should I just not use this pass?
> 
> - Andrew
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