[LLVMdev] Floats as Doubles in Vectors

[Nadav Rotem]

Hi Hal, 

I am not familiar with Blue Gene at all but I will do my best to answer. 

> is going to assume that the vectors can hold 256/32 == 8 single-precision values even though the real maximum is 4 values. How should we handle this?

The loop vectorizer uses TTI to find the size of the vector register. It uses this number to calculate the maximum vectorization factor. The formula is MaxVF = (RegSize/LargestElementTypeSize).  Next it checks for the costs of all of the possible vectorization factors from 1 (scalar) to MaxVF.  

I think that the best approach would be to improve the cost model because on blue gene <8 x float> ops would be more expensive than <4 x float>. 

> 
> 1. Do nothing and let the type legalization cost take care of penalizing the formation of <8 x float> vectors. This may work, but will cause an unnecessary compile-time increase.

Not only that, it would produce suboptimal code in many cases. For example, the loop vectorizer unrolls the loops itself in order to increase ILP. We don't want the type legalize to add additional ILP. Additionally, if you have smaller types they may get legalized into a single register. For example <8 x i8> or <8 x i8>.

> 2. Add some kind of API to TTI that allows the default logic (# == vector-size/type-size) to be overridden. This could be something specific to the problem at hand, such as: bool areFloatsStoredAsDoublesInVectors(), or something more general. Maybe something like: unsigned getSizeAsVectorElement(Type *T) which would return the number of bytes that the specified type actually takes up when used as a vector element.

I prefer to fix the cost model. Do you see any problems with this approach ?  I understand that it is more difficult to select the VF in the BB vectorizer, but I suspect that even if we add an additional api (such as getTargetMaxVF) we will run into problems with non-float data types.

Thanks,
Nadav