Re: [PATCH] x86: Run checksumming in parallel accross multiple alu's

[Neil Horman]

On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 05:20:45PM +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> 
> * Neil Horman <nhorman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > Base:
> >        0.093269042 seconds time elapsed                                          ( +-  2.24% )
> > Prefetch (5x64):
> >        0.079440009 seconds time elapsed                                          ( +-  2.29% )
> > Parallel ALU:
> >        0.087666677 seconds time elapsed                                          ( +-  4.01% )
> > Prefetch + Parallel ALU:
> >        0.080758702 seconds time elapsed                                          ( +-  2.34% )
> > 
> > So we can see here that we get about a 1% speedup between the base 
> > and the both (Prefetch + Parallel ALU) case, with prefetch 
> > accounting for most of that speedup.
> 
> Hm, there's still something strange about these results. So the 
> range of the results is 790-930 nsecs. The noise of the measurements 
> is 2%-4%, i.e. 20-40 nsecs.
> 
> The prefetch-only result itself is the fastest of all - 
> statistically equivalent to the prefetch+parallel-ALU result, within 
> the noise range.
> 
> So if prefetch is enabled, turning on parallel-ALU has no measurable 
> effect - which is counter-intuitive. Do you have an 
> theory/explanation for that?
> 
> Thanks,
 I mentioned it farther down, loosely theorizing that running with parallel
alu's in conjunction with a prefetch, puts more pressure on the load/store unit
causing stalls while both alu's wait for the L1 cache to fill.  Not sure if that
makes sense, but I did note that in the both (prefetch+alu case) our data cache
hit rate was somewhat degraded, so I was going to play with the prefetch stride
to see if that fixed the situation.  Regardless I agree, the lack of improvement
in the both case is definately counter-intuitive.

Neil

> 
> 	Ingo
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