AVX 256 instructions in JDK7?

[Christian Thalinger]

[That question should go to hotspot-compiler-dev.  BCC'ed hotspot-runtime-dev.]

On Mar 26, 2013, at 8:20 AM, Ondřej Perutka <perutka.ondrej at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> I've got a question related to my project. It is Java wrapper for Libav libraries and I have some performance issues with it.
> 
> If I compile the libraries with AVX instructions enabled the whole testing application uses approximately 130% of CPU time in comparison to the same libraries with AVX disabled. The problem is definitely in "bad" transitions between SSE and AVX instructions. These transitions are costly in case the upper part of YMM registers is not zeroed using VZEROUPPER or VZEROALL instruction before using SSE. More details at http://agner.org/optimize/optimizing_assembly.pdf (section 13.6).
> 
> There is no problem with those libraries, if they are not used from Java. I used Intel's Software Developer Emulator to find those bad AVX <-> SSE transitions and I found thousands of them. The origin of almost all bad transitions from AVX -> SSE (I mean the code that uses AVX 256 instructions and does not call VZEROUPPER) is somewhere inside anonymous memory blocks (according to Intel's SDE and pmem).
> 
> Libav mixes SSE and AVX 128 instructions a lot. It cannot cause any trouble if the upper part of YMM registers is zeroed. But in case it is not zeroed it would oscillate between B and C states (according to the Agner's terminology). Both of these transitions costs quite a lot of CPU cycles.
> 
> So here is my question: Is it possible that JIT compiler compiles some bytecode into native instructions, uses some AVX 256 instrucitons, does not use VZEROUPPER and puts the result into some anonymous memory block?
> 
> Ondrej Perutka

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