Trying out AVX

Intel's new Sandy Bridge CPUs came out this week and they support a new set of instructions called AVX. The AVX instructions are a much bigger change than the usual SSE revisions in the past few micro-architectures. First of all, they double the 128 bit SSE registers to 256 bits. Second, they introduce an entirely new instruction encoding. The new encoding switches from 2 operand instructions to 3 operand instructions allowing the destination register to be different than the source registers. For example:
  addps r0, r1       # (r0 = r0 + r1)
         vs.
  vaddps r0, r1, r2  # (r0 = r1 + r2)
This new encoding is not only used for the new 256 bit instructions, but also for the 128 bit AVX versions of all the old SSE instructions. This means that existing SSE code can improved without requiring a switch to 256 bit registers. Finally, AVX introduces some new data movement instructions, which should help improve code efficiency.

I decided to see what kind of performance difference using AVX could make in qcms with minimal effort. If you use SSE compiler intrinsics, like qcms does, switching to AVX is very easy; simply recompile with -mavx. In addition to using -mavx, I also took advantage of some of the new data movement instructions by replacing the following:
  vec_r = _mm_load_ss(r);
  vec_r = _mm_shuffle_ps(vec_r, vec_r, 0);
with the the new vbroadcastss instruction:
  vec_r = _mm_broadcast(r);
Overall, this change reduces the inner loop by 3 instructions.

The performance results were positive, but not what I expected. Here's what the timings were:

SSE2:	75798 usecs
AVX (-mavx):	69687 usecs
AVX w/ vbroadcastss:	72917 usecs

Switching to the AVX encoding improves performance by more than I expected: nearly 10%. But adding the new vbroadcastss instruction, in addition to the AVX encoding, not only doesn't help, but actually makes things worse. I tried analyzing the code with the Intel Architecture Code Analyzer, but the analyzer also thought that using vbroadcastss should be faster. If anyone has any ideas why vbroadcastss would be slower, I'd love to hear them.

Despite this weird performance problem, AVX seems like a good step forward and should provide good opportunities for improving performance beyond what's possible with SSE. For more information, check out this presentation which gives a good overview of how to take advantage AVX.