[PATCH] 8217561 : X86: Add floating-point Math.min/max intrinsics, approval request

[B. Blaser]

Thanks for your feedback, Andrew and Vladimir.
I'll update the webrev accordingly adding the heuristic and the benchmarks.

Bernard

On Wed, 20 Feb 2019 at 18:53, Vladimir Kozlov
<vladimir.kozlov at oracle.com> wrote:
>
> On 2/20/19 9:39 AM, Andrew Haley wrote:
> > On 2/19/19 3:16 PM, B. Blaser wrote:
> >
> >> So, I did some experiments and it seems that the most important
> >> branch is the last one.
> >> If data is well balanced like in the initial benchmark I posted,
> >> branch prediction is poor and the intrinsic is 2x faster, in all
> >> other cases it'd be better to avoid it:
> >
> > I tried this an it seems to work.
> >
> > This idea looks extremely promising. It's not perfect in that there
> > are still datasets that confuse it, but it's surely an improvement
> > over what we have today.
> >
> > Vladimir, what say you? This is a useful heuristic which avoids
> > performance regressions caused by min/max in almost all cases. I say
> > we want it.
>
> Yes, this would be nice.
>
> >
> > NB: this heuristic is probably good for CMOV instructions too.
>
> Agree, we had a lot of comments back when we implemented CMOV. There was big discussion what is better - short jump or
> cmove. It all depends on bench prediction as in this case.
>
> Regards,
> Vladimir