AVX overhead profiling
Mathias Gottschlag, Tim S. Schmidt, Frank Bellosa · 2020
The AVX2 and AVX-512 instructions found in recent Intel CPUs can increase the performance of vectorized code. Their complexity and increased power consumption, however, causes the CPU to reduce its frequency. This frequency reduction can affect parts of the workload which do not use AVX2 or AVX-512, with previous work reporting an overall slowdown of more than 10% for various workloads with AVX-512-enabled parts. Although countermeasures against this frequency reduction overhead exist, they themselves cause additional overhead and are therefore only viable if the gains are larger than the additional overhead.