[LLVMdev] [RFC] BlockFrequency is the wrong metric; we need a new one

[Owen Anderson]

On Feb 2, 2014, at 6:18 PM, Andrew Trick <atrick at apple.com> wrote:

>> The result of such a system would produce weights for every block in the above CFG as '1.0', or equivalent to the entry block weight. This to me is a really useful metric -- it indicates that no block in the CFG is really more or less likely than any other. Only *biases* in a specific direction would cause the block weights to go up or down significantly.
> 
> I don't like this statement, or don't understand it. It is useful to know a branch is unbiased. Currently we assume branches are unbiased then optimize conservatively in those cases (do no harm). But if we had greater confidence in unbiased branches (because the branch was actually profiled), we could if-convert much more aggressively

As an aside, I’d like to point out that knowing that a branch is unbiased is not sufficient to know that it is poorly predicted and therefore profitable to if-convert.   Consider a case where a branch is evaluated 100 times, going to the true destination 50 times and the false destination 50 times.  If the cases where it goes each particular direction is strongly correlated with prior branches in the execution trace, the branch predictor’s history table will pick up on that and successfully predict this branch despite it being unbiased when considered in isolation.

—Owen
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