Hi Richard, > I guess an obvious question is: if 1 (rather than 2) was the right value > for cores with 2 FMA pipes, why is 4 the right value for cores with 4 FMA > pipes? It would be good to clarify how, conceptually, the core property > should map to the fma_reassoc_width value.
1 turns off reassociation so that FMAs get properly formed. After reassociation far fewer FMAs get formed so we end up with more FLOPS which means slower execution. It's a significant slowdown on cores that are not wide, have only 1 or 2 FP pipes and may have high FP latencies. So we turn it off by default on all older cores. > It sounds from the existing comment like the main motivation for returning 1 > was to encourage more FMAs to be formed, rather than to prevent FMAs from > being reassociated. Is that no longer an issue? Or is the point that, > with more FMA pipes, lower FMA formation is a price worth paying for > the better parallelism we get when FMAs can be formed? Exactly. A wide CPU can deal with the extra instructions, so the loss from fewer FMAs ends up lower than the speedup from the extra parallelism. Having more FMAs will be even faster of course. > Does this code ever see opc == FMA? No, that's the problem, reassociation ignores the fact that we actually want FMAs. A smart reassociation pass could form more FMAs while also increasing parallelism, but the way it currently works always results in fewer FMAs. Cheers, Wilco
