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Re: Performance with Intel Foster chip
- From: Davide Libenzi <davidel at xmailserver dot org>
- To: Mark Hahn <hahn at physics dot mcmaster dot ca>
- Cc: Thomas Hiller <thomas dot hiller at sap dot com>, <gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org>
- Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2002 09:35:10 -0800 (PST)
- Subject: Re: Performance with Intel Foster chip
On Fri, 22 Feb 2002, Mark Hahn wrote:
> > I believe these units are visiable via hyperthreading functionallity, so
> > any code that is multithreaded can take advantage of that (with some kernel
> > side tunning).
>
> HT simply turns a single processor, whose internal functional units
> are often idle or stalled, into two processors. the hope is to "soak up"
> some of those idle units, and/or to overlap stalled and busy areas.
> the OS interface is almost exactly like you simply doubled each CPU -
> you have to boot them, appear to have separate registers, mmu context,
> bios suddenly shows 2x, etc.
>
> I don't see any involvement of gcc, except that it lessens the
> accuracy of the cost predictions that drive instruction selection.
According to a recent Intel white paper, they claim that HT get make you
get 10-12% improvements with unaware code and up to 33% with aware code.
Since the cores basically shares 'everything' but register banks, memory
accesses become particularly critical.
- Davide