[Bug rtl-optimization/60086] New: suboptimal asm generated for a loop (store/load false aliasing)

["marcin.krotkiewski at gmail dot com" <gcc-bugzilla@gcc.gnu.org>]

http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=60086

            Bug ID: 60086
           Summary: suboptimal asm generated for a loop (store/load false
                    aliasing)
           Product: gcc
           Version: 4.7.3
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P3
         Component: rtl-optimization
          Assignee: unassigned at gcc dot gnu.org
          Reporter: marcin.krotkiewski at gmail dot com

Created attachment 32060
  --> http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/attachment.cgi?id=32060&action=edit
source code that compiles

Hello,

I am seeing suboptimal performance of the following loop compiled with
gcc 4.7.3 (but also 4.4.7, Ubuntu, full test code attached):

    for(i=0; i<NSIZE; i++){
      a[i] += b[i];
      c[i] += d[i];
    }

Arrays are dynamically allocated and aligned to page boundary, declared
with __restrict__ and __attribute__((aligned(32))). I am running on
Intel i7-2620M (Sandy Bridge).

The problem is IMHO related to '4k aliasing'. It happens for the most
common case of a/b/c/d starting at page boundary (e.g., natural result
of malloc). To demonstrate, here is the assembly generated with 'gcc
-mtune=native -mavx -O3':

.L8:
        vmovapd (%rdx,%rdi), %ymm0        #1 load b
        addq    $1, %r8                #2
        vaddpd  (%rcx,%rdi), %ymm0, %ymm0    #3 load a and add
        vmovapd %ymm0, (%rdx,%rdi)        #4 store a
        vmovapd (%rax,%rdi), %ymm0        #5 load d
        vaddpd  (%rsi,%rdi), %ymm0, %ymm0    #6 load c and add
        vmovapd %ymm0, (%rax,%rdi)        #7 store c
        addq    $32, %rdi            #8
        cmpq    %r8, %r12            #9
        ja      .L8                #10

The 4k aliasing problem is caused by lines 4 and 5 (writing result to
array a and reading data from either c or d). From my tests this seems
to be the default behavior for both AVX and SSE2 instruction sets, and
for both vectorized and non-vectorized cases.

It is easy to fix the problem by placing the two writes together, at the
end of the iteration, e.g.:

.L8:
        vmovapd (%rdx,%rdi), %ymm1        #1
        addq    $1, %r8                #2
        vaddpd  (%rcx,%rdi), %ymm1, %ymm1    #3
        vmovapd (%rax,%rdi), %ymm0        #4
        vaddpd  (%rsi,%rdi), %ymm0, %ymm0    #5
        vmovapd %ymm1, (%rdx,%rdi)        #6
        vmovapd %ymm0, (%rax,%rdi)        #7
        addq    $32, %rdi            #8
        cmpq    %r8, %r12            #9
        ja      .L8                #10

In this case the writes happen after all the loads. The above code is
(almost) what ICC generates for this case. For problem sizes small
enough to fit in L1 the speedup is roughly 50%.