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From: anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: number of registers
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2024 10:13:12 GMT
Organization: Institut fuer Computersprachen, Technische Universitaet Wien
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mitchalsup@aol.com (MitchAlsup1) writes:
>The point is that the cost of not getting allocated into a register
>is vastly lower--the count of instructions remains 1 while the
>latency increases. That increase in latency does not hurt those
>use once/seldom variables.

Latency is not the issue in modern high-performance AMD64 cores, which
have zero-cycle store-to-load forwarding
<http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/memdep/>.

And yet, putting variables in registers gives a significant speedup:
On a Rocket Lake, numbers are times in seconds:

 sieve bubble matrix   fib   fft
 0.075  0.070  0.036 0.049 0.017 TOS in reg, RP in reg, IP in reg
 0.100  0.149  0.054 0.106 0.037 TOS in mem, RP in mem, IP write-through to mem

In the first line, I used gforth-fast and tried to disable all
optimizations except those that keep certain variables in registers:

gforth-fast --ss-states=1 --ss-number=31 --opt-ip-updates=0 onebench.fs

I could not reduce the static superinstructions below 31 and still get
a result; I will have to investigate why, but that probably does not
make that much of a difference for several of these benchmarks.

In the second line I used gforth, an engine that keeps the top of
stack in memory, the return-stack pointer in memory, stores IP to
memory after every change, and does not use static superinstructions,
all for better identifying where an error happened.

>The the examples cited, the lack of register allocation triples
>the instruction count due to lack of LD-OP and LD-OP-ST. The
>register count I stated is how many registers would a
>non-LD-OP machine need to break even on the instruction count.

What makes you think that instruction count is particularly relevant?
Yes, you may save some decoding resources if you use LD-OP-ST on an
architecture that supports it, but you first had to invest into a more
complex decoder.  And in the OoO engine the difference may be gone (at
least on Intel CPUs).

Consider the Forth program

: squared dup * ;

This results in the following code sequences for the two engines
mentioned above:

 dup    1->1              dup    0->0 
                            mov     $50[r13],r15
   add     rbx,$08          add     r15,$08
   mov     $00[r13],r8      mov     rax,[r14]
   sub     r13,$08          sub     r14,$08
                            mov     [r14],rax
 *    1->1                *    0->0 
                            mov     $50[r13],r15
   add     rbx,$08          add     r15,$08
                            mov     rax,$08[r14]
   imul    r8,$08[r13]      imul    rax,[r14]
   add     r13,$08          add     r14,$08
                            mov     [r14],rax
 ;s    1->1               ;s    0->0 
                            mov     $50[r13],r15
                            mov     rax,$58[r13]
   mov     rbx,[r14]        mov     r10,[rax]
   add     r14,$08          add     rax,$08
                            mov     $58[r13],rax
                            mov     r15,r10
   mov     rax,[rbx]        mov     rcx,[r15]
   jmp     rax              jmp     rcx

TOS=r8, RP=r14, IP=rbx    TOS=[r14], RP=$58[r13], IP=r15/$50[r13]

The registers are allocated differently in the two engines; for the
three things where the memory/register allocation differed, I have
shown the allocation.

One interesting case is the sequence

7FA02A77133D:   mov     rax,$58[r13]
7FA02A771341:   mov     r10,[rax]
7FA02A771344:   add     rax,$08
7FA02A771348:   mov     $58[r13],rax

Sure you could use a load-op-store instruction for adding 8 to
$58[r13], but the mov in 7FA02A771341 still needs the value in a
register, so apparently gcc (which produced the code snippets for the
individual Forth words above) decided that it's better to save
execution resources rather than reduce the number of instructions (at
a higher execution resource cost) by writing the code as

mov     rax,$58[r13]
add     $58[r13], $8
mov     r10,[rax]

- anton
-- 
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
  Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>