sgemm_ncopy_4_skylakex.c uses SSE transpose operations where the
real perf win happens; this also works great for Haswell.
This gives double digit percentage gains on small and skinny matrices
with a few small changes it's possible to use the skylake sgemm code
also for haswell, this gives a modest gain (10% range) for smallish
matrixes but does wonders for very skinny matrixes
OpenBLAS has a fancy algorithm for copying the input data while laying
it out in a more CPU friendly memory layout.
This is great for large matrixes; the cost of the copy is easily
ammortized by the gains from the better memory layout.
But for small matrixes (on CPUs that can do efficient unaligned loads) this
copy can be a net loss.
This patch adds (for SKYLAKEX initially) a "sgemm direct" mode, that bypasses
the whole copy machinary for ALPHA=1/BETA=0/... standard arguments,
for small matrixes only.
What is small? For the non-threaded case this has been measured to be
in the M*N*K = 28 * 512 * 512 range, while in the threaded case it's
less, around M*N*K = 1 * 512 * 512
The Makefile variable parser in utils.cmake currently does not handle conditionals. Having the definitions for non-OSX last will at least make cmake builds work again on non-OSX platforms.
Plain cgemm_kernel and zgemm_kernel are not used anywhere, only cgemm_kernel_b etc.
Needlessly building them (without any define like NN, CN, etc.) just happened to work on most platforms, but not on arm64. See #1870
ARMv8 builds were a bit mixed up, with ThunderX2 code in ARMv8 mode
(which is not right because TX2 is ARMv8.1) as well as requiring a few
redundancies in the defines, making it harder to maintain and understand
what core has what. A few other minor issues were also fixed.
Tests were made on the following cores: A53, A57, A72, Falkor, ThunderX,
ThunderX2, and XGene.
Tests were: OpenBLAS/test, OpenBLAS/benchmark, BLAS-Tester.
A summary:
* Removed TX2 code from ARMv8 build, to make sure it is compatible with
all ARMv8 cores, not just v8.1. Also, the TX2 code has actually
harmed performance on big cores.
* Commoned up ARMv8 architectures' defines in params.h, to make sure
that all will benefit from ARMv8 settings, in addition to their own.
* Adding a few more cores, using ARMv8's include strategy, to benefit
from compiler optimisations using mtune. Also updated cache
information from the manuals, making sure we set good conservative
values by default. Removed Vulcan, as it's an alias to TX2.
* Auto-detecting most of those cores, but also updating the forced
compilation in getarch.c, to make sure the parameters are the same
whether compiled natively or forced arch.
Benefits:
* ARMv8 build is now guaranteed to work on all ARMv8 cores
* Improved performance for ARMv8 builds on some cores (A72, Falkor,
ThunderX1 and 2: up to 11%) over current develop
* Improved performance for *all* cores comparing to develop branch
before TX2's patch (9% ~ 36%)
* ThunderX1 builds are 14% faster than ARMv8 on TX1, 9% faster than
current develop's branch and 8% faster than deveop before tx2 patches
Issues:
* Regression from current develop branch for A53 (-12%) and A57 (-3%)
with ARMv8 builds, but still faster than before TX2's commit (+15%
and +24% respectively). This can be improved with a simplification of
TX2's code, to be done in future patches. At least the code is
guaranteed to be ARMv8.0 now.
Comments:
* CortexA57 builds are unchanged on A57 hardware from develop's branch,
which makes sense, as it's untouched.
* CortexA72 builds improve over A57 on A72 hardware, even if they're
using the same includes due to new compiler tunning in the makefile.
in the threading code there are cases where N or M can become 0,
and the optimized beta code did not handle this well, leading
to a crash
during the audit for the crash a few edge conditions on the if statements
were found and fixed as well
Martin Kroeker