Illuminating the processor core with LLVM-mca

64 pointsposted a day ago
by ckennelly

5 Comments

KeplerBoy

a day ago

Also nicely demonstrated in godbolt's currently ongoing Advent of compiler optimizations series.

fweimer

a day ago

Wouldn't LLVM adjust the models if it is beneficial to its code generation, even if the result less accurately reflects the processor? (I think GCC does that.)

alain94040

a day ago

This is interesting if quite incomplete (as noted in the end conclusion). CPU re-order buffers turn what you think as mostly sequential execution into a massively parallel engine. Data memory access, perfecting, speculative execution, etc. But if you are running a micro-bencmark with a tight loop of millions of iterations, then understanding the pipeline dependencies and dispatching can provide good insights.

drob518

a day ago

Yep. Cache is always the wildcard.

esbranson

a day ago

Too bad they don't support LC-3 or DLX. More my level lol. So begins another deep dive side quest with the chatbot into a tool I didn't even know existed.