Investigating the impact of code generation on performance characteristics of integer programs
Ramkumar Jayaseelan, Anasua Bhowmik, Roy Dz-Ching Ju · 2010
As the complexity of interactions among microprocessors, platforms, and system software increases, compilers play a greater role in extracting performance for applications. Different compiler technologies have contributed significantly in improving the designs of various processor architectures and in delivering end-user performance. Workload analysis of benchmark suites has traditionally focused on understanding the behaviors of the suites under different system configurations and studying the sensitivity of the suites to different system parameters. In this paper, we study the effect of compiler technology and implementation on workload behaviors. This study aims at understanding how performance and its leading metrics behave differently with different compiler implementations targeting the same architecture and programs. We use the quad-core AMD Opteron processors and the SPEC CPU 2006 Integer benchmark to evaluate how various micro-architecture performance metrics are sensitive to three top-performing compilers. Even though all three compilers produce overall good performance, our analysis shows that different compilers may vary widely on individual program performances. Binaries from different compilers vary both in terms of architecture metrics, such as instruction counts and instruction mix distribution, and micro-architecture metrics, such as cache miss rates and branch mis-predictions. For programs with large deviations in some of the metrics, we attribute the differences to the choices or strengths in a particular compiler implementation, for example on function inlining, 32-bit versus 64-bit compilation, software prefetching, vectorization, register allocation, etc.