Question about the data packing lab

[jsjtxietian]

Hi thanks for the great lab.

I know that the data packing lab is marked as broken as I can't get the about 20% speed up as mentioned in the video too, however I do get about 3-8% speed up when using clang 17 on windows. Maybe we can investigate further about the current state of this lab ?

[dendibakh]

Hi @jsjtxietian , sure, if you're interested, feel free to investigate. I'm currently very busy, so I won't be able to look into this in the next 1-2 months.

[jsjtxietian]

The following data is collected when N= 50000 and iteration time is 10000, on windows11 using vtune with clang ver 17.0.6
(Note: I can not get reliable opt effect when using the origin N's config)

Running hotspot analysis shows the time saving mainly comes from std::shuffle:

Microarchitecture exploration shows a little decrease in backend bound:

Something I observe when comparing hardware events:

• Reduced Data Cache Miss Cycles:
  • MEMORY_ACTIVITY.STALLS_L1D_MISS P-Core 3,336,010,008 - 696,002,088 = 2,640,007,920
  • MEMORY_ACTIVITY.STALLS_L2_MISS P-Core 2,232,006,696 - 192,000,576 = 2,040,006,120
• Fewer Split Loads and Stores:
  • MEM_INST_RETIRED.SPLIT_LOADS P-Core 1,574,447,232 - 537,616,128 = 1,036,831,104
  • MEM_INST_RETIRED.SPLIT_STORES P-Core 1,533,646,008 - 496,814,904 = 1,036,831,104
• Reduced DTLB Misses:
  • DTLB_LOAD_MISSES.STLB_HIT:cmask=1 P-Core 576,017,280 - 345,610,368 = 230,406,912
  • DTLB_STORE_MISSES.STLB_HIT:cmask=1 P-Core 964,828,944 - 859,225,776 = 105,603,168