问题
I have disassembled a small C++ program compiled with MSVC v140 and am trying to estimate the cycles per instruction in order to better understand how code design impacts performance. I've been following Mike Acton's CppCon 2014 talk on "Data-Oriented Design and C++", specifically the portion I've linked to.
In it, he points out these lines:
movss 8(%rbx), %xmm1
movss 12(%rbx), %xmm0
He then claims that these 2 x 32-bit reads are probably on the same cache line therefore cost roughly ~200 cycles.
The Intel 64 and IA-32 Architectures Optimization Reference Manual has been a great resource, specifically "Appendix C - Instruction Latency and Throughput". However on page C-15 in "Table C-16. Streaming SIMD Extension Single-precision Floating-point Instructions" it states that movss is only 1 cycle (unless I'm understanding what latency means here wrong... if so, how do I read this thing?)
I know that a theoretical prediction of execution time will never be correct, but nevertheless this is important to learn. How are these two commands 200 cycles, and how can I learn to reason about execution time beyond this snippet?
I've started to read some things on CPU pipelining... maybe the majority of the cycles are being picked up there?
PS: I'm not interested in actually measuring hardware performance counters here. I'm just looking to learn how to reasonable sight read ASM and cycles.
回答1:
As you already pointed out, the theoretical throughput and latency of a MOVSS instruction is at 1 cycle. You were looking at the right document (Intel Optimization Manual). Agner Fog (mentioned in the comments) measured the same numbers in his Intruction Tables for Intel CPUs (AMD is has a higher latency).
This leads us to the first problem: What specific microarchitecture are you investigating? This can make a big difference, even for the same vendor. Agner Fog reports that MOVSS has a 2-6cy latency on AMD Bulldozer depending on the source and destination (register vs memory). This is important to keep in mind when looking into performance of computer architectures.
The 200cy are most likely cache misses, as already pointed out be dwelch in the comments. The numbers you get from the Optimization Manual for any memory accessing instructions are all under the assumption that the data resides in the first level cache (L1). Now, if you have never touched the data by previous instructions the cache line (64 bytes with Intel and AMD x86) will need to be loaded from memory into the last level cache, form there into the second level cache, then into L1 and finally into the XMM register (within 1 cycle). Transfers between L3-L2 and L2-L1 have a throughput (not latency!) of two cycles per cache line on current Intel microarchitectures. And the memory bandwidth can be used to estimate the throughput between L3 and memory (e.g, a 2 GHz CPU with an achievable memory bandwidth of 40 GB/s will have a throughput of 3.2 cycles per cache line). Cache lines or memory blocks are typically the smallest unit caches and memory can operate on, they differ between microarchitectures and may even be different within the architecture, depending on the cache level (L1, L2 and so on).
Now this is all throughput and not latency, which will not help you estimate what you have described above. To verify this, you would need to execute the instructions over and over (for at least 1/10s) to get cycle accurate measurements. By changing the instructions you can decide if you want to measure for latency (by including dependencies between instructions) or throughput (by having the instructions input independent of the result of previous instructions). To measure for caches and memory accesses you would need to predict if an access is going to a cache or not, this can be done using layer conditions.
A tool to estimate instruction execution (both latency and throughput) for Intel CPUs is the Intel Architecture Code Analyzer, which supports multiple microarchitectures up to Haswell. The latency predictions are to be taken with the grain of salt, since it much harder to estimate latency than throughput.
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36298678/estimating-cycles-per-instruction