[LLVMdev] ARM vectorizer cost model

[Renato Golin Linaro]

On 9 January 2013 17:10, Nadav Rotem <nrotem at apple.com> wrote:

> For example:
>         "opt -cost-model -analyze dumper.ll -mtriple=thumbv7
> -mcpu=cortex-a15"
>
> I also run the vectorizer with -debug-only=loop-vectorize because it dumps
> the costs of all of the instructions with different vectorization factors,
> and it also detects the different kinds of shuffles that we support.
>

Hi Nadav,

These are great ways of debugging the cost model!


The LoopVectorizerCostModel only predicts which IR will be generated when
> vectorizing to a specific vector width. It uses TTI to get the cost of each
> IR instruction. Chandler recently refactored TTI (thank!) and now TTI is an
> analysis group. The BasicTTI attempts to handle all of the target
> independent logic. It uses the TargetLowering interface to check if the
> types are legal and how many times large vectors need to be split.
> Different targets need to implement the cases that the BasicTTI does not
> catch. For example, the cost of zext <8xi8> to <8 x i32> which is custom
> lowered on some targets.
>

I'm also thinking about the individual instructions cost
(getArithmeticInstrCost, getShuffleCost, etc). That can be a simple and
easily parallelized task. I got the A9 manual that has the cost of all
instructions (including NEON and VFP), that should give us a head start.

I'm guessing the cost you already have for Intel and the BasicTTI is in
"ideal cycle count", not taking into consideration the time available to
get the results or pipeline stalls, etc. In the end, when the model is
complete, it doesn't matter much the individual numbers, as long as they
scale equally, but for now, while we're still relying on BasicTTI, we
should follow a similar approach.



> I am not aware of anything that we can do in regard to context switches.
> Do you mean the cost of moving GPR to NEON ? Its a good point. We need to
> increase the cost of insert/extract vector. It should be easy to model and
> we have all of the hooks already.
>

Yes, and pipeline stalls, and intra-instruction behaviour, and A9 oddities,
but that's all blue sky ideas for now. I don't think it'll be a hard
engineering problem to know where to put the code, but it won't be easy to
get some things right without badly breaking others. Let's be conservative
for now... ;)


We can use the Subtarget when we implement the hooks. This is an example
> from the ARMTTI


Yes, this direct access is very convenient. For now, I'll focus on A9 and
later we can add the subtleties of each sub-target.

cheers,
--renato
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