GCC-4.5.0 comparison with previous releases and LLVM-2.7 on SPEC2000 for x86/x86_64

[Vladimir Makarov]

Xinliang David Li wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 9:25 AM, Vladimir Makarov <vmakarov@redhat.com> wrote:
>   
>>  GCC-4.5.0 and LLVM-2.7 were released recently.  To understand
>> where we stand after releasing GCC-4.5.0 I benchmarked it on SPEC2000
>> for x86/x86-64 and posted the comparison of it with the
>> previous GCC releases and LLVM-2.7.
>>
>>  Even benchmarking SPEC2000 takes a lot of time on the fastest
>> machine I have. So I don't plan to use SPEC2006 for this in near
>> future.
>>
>>  You can find the comparison on
>> http://vmakarov.fedorapeople.org/spec/ (please just click links at the
>> bottom of the left frame starting with link "GCC release comparison").
>>
>>  If you need exact numbers, please use the tables (the links to them
>> are also given) which were used to generate the corresponding bar
>> graphs.
>>
>>
>>  In general GCC-4.5.0 became faster (upto 10%) in -O2 mode.  This is
>> first considerable compilation speed improvement since GCC-4.2.
>> GCC-4.5.0 generates a better (1-2% in average upto 4% for x86-64
>> SPECFP2000 in -O2 mode) code too in comparison with the previous
>> release.  That is not including LTO and Graphite which can gives even
>> more (especially LTO) in many cases.
>>
>>  GCC-4.5.0 has new big optimizations LTO and Graphite (more
>> accurately graphite was introduced in the previous release).
>> Therefore I ran additional benchmarks to test them.
>>
>>  LTO is a promising technology especially for integer benchmarks for
>> which it results in smaller and faster code.  But it might result in
>> degradations too on SPECFP2000 mainly because of big degradations on a
>> few benchmarks like wupwise or facerec.  Another annoying thing about
>> LTO, it considerably slows down the compiler.
>>     
>
>
> The LTO improvement on spec2000int is is only 1.86%
>
>                 4.5     4.5+lto Improvement
> 164.gzip        955     950     -0.52%       <-- degrade
> 175.vpr         588     594     1.02%
> 176.gcc         1211    1216    0.41%
> 181.mcf         699     698     -0.14%
> 186.crafty      1011    987     -2.37%    <--- degrade
> 197.parser      792     813     2.65%
> 252.eon         1026    1023    -0.29%   <-- degrade
> 253.perlbmk     1312    1294    -1.37%  <-- degrade
> 254.gap         1021    1037    1.57%
> 255.vortex      1123    1319    17.45%
> 256.bzip2       737     768     4.21%
> 300.twolf       773     779     0.78%
> -----------------------------------------------------
> SPECint2000     913     930     1.86%
>
>
> This matches our previous observation that to bring the best out of
> LTO, FDO is also needed. (As a reference, LIPO improves over plain FDO
> by ~4.5%, vortex improves 23%).  You will probably see even smaller
> improvement in SPEC2006.
>
>   
Thanks for the comments.  FDO will probably improve SPEC2000 score.  
Although it is not obvious for some tests because the train data sets 
for them are different from the reference data sets and it might 
actually mislead the  compiler.

FDO is important for optimizations where all possible data sets do not 
change branch probability distribution much.  IMHO therefore FDO is not 
widely used by most of developers (although I am sure that for Google 
applications it is extremely important) and therefore I don't measure it 
and it is not so interesting for me.  Although bigger reason not use FDO 
is inconvenience to use it for regular compiler user.

As for vortex FDO improvement, vortex contains a moderate size loop in 
which most of time is spent.  The loop has if-then-else on the top loop 
level.  On all SPEC2000 data sets, one if-branch  is  taken practically 
always  (like 1 to  1,000,000).   So it is not amazing for me that FDO 
gives such improvement for vortex.
> It would be great if there is number collected comparing LTO + FDO vs
> plain FDO in the same setup.
>
>   
Usually after such posting the comparisons,  I am getting a lot of 
requests.  I'd like to do all of them but unfortunately running and the 
result preparation takes a lot of my time.  May be I'll do such 
comparison next year.