Cliff Click's Crash Course In Modern Hardware

Lord Straxus writes "In this presentation (video) from the JVM Languages Summit 2009, Cliff Click talks about why it's almost impossible to tell what an x86 chip is really doing to your code due to all of the crazy kung-fu and ninjitsu it does to your code while it's running. This talk is an excellent drill-down into the internals of the x86 chip, and it's a great way to get an understanding of what really goes on down at the hardware and why certain types of applications run so much faster than other types of applications. Dr. Cliff really knows his stuff!"

Comments

Code in high-level

[elh_inny]

Iit doesn't make sense to code in ASM anymore.
With computing expanding towards more and more parallelism, I can clearly see that one should learn to start coding in the most abstract of way and let the tools do the optimisation for him...

Re:Code in high-level

[caerwyn]

That's not entirely true. In performance-sensitive tight loops, it can still make sense to code in ASM to avoid pipeline bubbles and stalls in some very limited situations. Also, the compiler doesn't always take advantage of instructions that it could use.

However, determining that takes a lot of effort and a lot of instrumentation, and so you'd better really need that last bit of performance before you go after it.

Re:Code in high-level

[Thiez]

Sometimes it's just plain FUN FUN FUN to code in asm. You're right that most programmers will never have a need for it at all (with some exceptions, such as those messing with operating systems or embedded systems), although knowing some ASM can help a lot with debugging. I suppose one could (read: should) learn a little ASM to have a better idea of what the hardware is doing, this will allow you to optimize your code a little, or (more importantly) write it in such a way that makes it easier for the compiler to optimize.

Re:Code in high-level

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone has to write those tools.

Re:Code in high-level

[Just Some Guy]

Someone has to write those tools.

Yeah, but they can be written in a HLL, too. You don't have to write a program in highly-tuned assembler to make it emit highly-tuned assembler.

Re:Code in high-level

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an old saying that performance improvement comes from better algorithms and not instruction fiddling. Simply put if your performance is not adequate using ordinary compiler code then you have serious issues with your software or hardware design.
Note that code fiddling couples the software closely to the specific CPU which is not a good idea unless you can control both indefinitely.

Re:Code in high-level

[caerwyn]

That's *generally* true. It's not *always* true.

There are a lot of purely compute-bound applications (think simulations of various sorts, etc) for which the algorithmic optimizations have already been done- but it's still worth going for the last few percent of performance from "instruction fiddling". As another poster said: if your app runs for weeks at a time, 1% improvement becomes significant in terms of time saved- and throwing more hardware at the problem isn't always feasible.

Re:Code in high-level

[smash]

Not quite.

But, its certainly better to code in a high level language first, test, tweak the algorithm as much as you can, PROFILE and THEN start breaking out your assembler. No point optimising 99% of your code in super fast asm if it only spends 1% of the cpu time in it. Even if you make all that code 10x as fast, you've only saved 0.9% cpu time. :)

Re:Code in high-level

[The_Wilschon]

It all depends on your problem domain. As a high energy physicist, I write plenty of code that me, a postdoc, and maybe a couple other grad students will ever see, and probably I'm the only one that will actually ever use it. I'm designing a small cluster that will get built here in a month or few, and some of my code will take up about 2 months of solid run time on it, then never see the light of day again. If I can spend 2 days getting a 5% performance improvement, even at the expense of locking the code to this cluster, it's a net win for us.

In short, I have no "customers", I know exactly what hardware my code will be running on, and it won't ever change (until they ditch the cluster in 4-5 years and make a new one, but I'll be long gone), and I don't even have to worry about maintaining the code years in the future.

All the same, I'll probably still write the code as cleanly as possible and run it through an optimizer, and leave it at that.

Re:Code in high-level

[afidel]

In general modern compilers are good enough that you are much more likely to get better performance by spending the time finding a better algorithm then you are hand optimizing the code. Obviously for things like H.264 where the algorithm is already set this is not true, but that's a very small fraction of the code out there.

Premature optimization is evil... and stupid

[Just Some Guy]

That's the main reason why I want to shoot people who write "clever" code on the first pass. Always make the rough draft of a program clean and readable. If (and only if!) you need to optimize it, use a profiler to see what actually needs work. If you do things like manually unroll loops where the body is only executed 23 times during the program's whole lifetime, or use shift to multiply because you read somewhere that it's fast, then don't be surprised when your coworkers revoke your oxygen bit.

Re:Premature optimization is evil... and stupid

[AuMatar]

It depends on where they spend their hardware, and what you're multiplying by. You can make a multiplier faster than shifting, it just requires a lot of hardware to do so. If you're multiplying by a constant power of 2, shifting will always be as fast or faster. If you're multiplying by a non power of 2 constant, shifting and adding may be faster, and probably is if there's fairly few 1s in the binary representation. But if they have a good multiplier then mult may be faster than shift/add for a random unknown multiply.

Also IIRC the p4 got rid of the barrel shifter on Intel. Or maybe it was the gen after that. THey may have re-added it though, it seems fairly stupid not to have one.

Re:Premature optimization is evil... and stupid

[kc8apf]

Having spent 4 years being one of the primary developers of Apple's main performance analysis tools (CHUD, not Instruments) and having helped developers from nearly every field imaginable tune their applications for performance, I can honestly say that regardless of your performance criteria, you shouldn't be doing anything special for optimization when you first write a program. Some thought should be given to the architecture and overall data flow of the program and how that design might have some high-level performance limits, but certainly no code should be written using explicit vector operations and all loops should be written for clarity. Scalability by partitioning the work is one of those items that can generally be incorporated into the program's architecture if the program lends itself to it, but most other performance-related changes depend on specific usage cases. Trying to guess those while writing the application logic relies solely on intuition which is usually wrong.

After you've written and debugged the application, profiling and tracing is the prime way for finding _where_ to do optimization. Your experiences have been tainted by the poor quality of tools known by the larger OSS community, but many good tools are free (as in beer) for many OSes (Shark for OS X as an example) while others cost a bit (VTune for Linux or Windows). Even large, complex multi-threaded programs can be profiled and tuned with decent profilers. I know for a fact that Shark is used to tune large applications such as Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Mathematica, and basically every application, daemon, and framework included in OS X.

What do you do if there really isn't much of a hotspot? Quake 3 was an example where the time was spread out over many C++ methods so no one hotspot really showed up. Using features available in the better profiling tools, the collected samples could be attributed up the stack to the actual algorithms instead of things like simple accessors. Once you do that, the problems become much more obvious.

What do you do after the application has been written and a major performance problem is found that would require an architectural change? Well, you change the architecture. The reason for not doing it during the initial design is that predicting performance issues is near impossible even for those of us who have spent years doing it as a full time job. Sure, you have to throw away some code or revisit the design to fix the performance issues, but that's a normal part of software design. You try an approach, find out why it won't work, and use that knowledge to come up with a new approach.

That largest failing I see from my experiences have been the lack of understanding by management and engineers that performance is a very iterative part of software design and that it happens late in the game. Frequently, schedules get set without consideration for the amount of time required to do performance analysis, let alone optimization. Then you have all the engineers who either try to optimize everything they encounter and end up wasting lots of time, or they do the initial implementation and never do any profiling.

Ultimately, if you try to build performance into a design very early, you end up with a big, messy, unmaintainable code base that isn't actually all that fast. If you build the design cleanly and then optimize the sections that actually need it, you have a most maintainable code base that meets the requirements. Be the latter.

Re:Premature optimization is evil... and stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally agree about the evils of premature opimisation, however I also think correct choice of algorithm and data structures is vital, and does not necessarily need to be left to the end. Often the correct choice of algorithm and data structure not only results in faster code, but more readable and maintainable code too. Of these the most often I see over looked is data-structure. For me learning functional programming really helped with this.

Re:Premature optimization is evil... and stupid

[epine]

That's the main reason why I want to shoot people who write "clever" code on the first pass.

Over the years, I've grown to hate this meme. Not because it isn't right, but because it stops ten floors below the penthouse of human potential.

First of all, it's an incredible instance of cultural drift. In the mid 1980s, when this meme was halfway current, I worked on adding support for Asian characters to an Asian-made PC. On the "make it right" pass it took 15s to update the screen after pressing the page down key, and this from assembly language. Slower than YouTube over 300 baud. It was doing a lot of pixel swizzling it shouldn't have been, because the fonts were supplied in a format better suited to printing. This was an order of magnitude below an invitation to whiffle-ball training camp. This was Lance Armstrong during his chemotherapy years towing a baby trailer. Today you get 60fps with a 100 thousand or a 100 million polygons, I've sort of lost track.

Let's not shunt performance onto the side track of irrelevancy. While there's no good excuse, ever, for writing faulty code, an enlightened balance between starting out with an approach you can live with, and exploiting necessary cleverness *within your ability* goes a long way.

How about we update Knuth's arthritic maxim? Don't tweak what you don't grok. If you grok, use your judgement. Exploit your human potential. Live a little.

The books I've been reading lately about the evolution of skills in the work place suggest that painstaking reductive work processes are on their way to India. Job security in home world is greatly enhanced if you can navigate multiple agendas in tandem, exploiting more of that judgement thing.

One of the reasons Carmack became so successful is that he didn't waste his effort looking for excuses to deprive his co-workers of their oxygen bits. Instead he conducted shrewd excursions along the edge of the envelope in pursuit of the sweet spot between cleverness too oppressive to live with, and no performance at all.

In my day of deprecating my elders, I always knew where the pea was hidden under the mattress. These days, there are so many squishy mattresses stacked one upon the other, I have to plan my work day with a step ladder. Which I think is what this unwatchable cult-encoded video is on about: the ankle level view most of us never see any more.

Here's another thing. I've you're going to be clever about how you code something, also be clever about how you do it. In other words, be equally clever all levels of the solution process simultaneously: algorithm selection, implementation, commenting, software engineering, documentation, and unit test. Knuth got away with TeX, barely, for precisely this reason. Because of his cleverness, the extension to handle Asian languages was far from elegant. Because of his cleverness (in making everything else run extremely well), people actually wanted to extend TeX to handle Asian languages. So who's to say he was wrong? Despite his cleverness, he managed to keep his booboo score in single or low double digits. His bug tracking database fit nicely on an index card.

In the modern era, people quote the old "make it right before you make it faster" as the cure for the halitosis of ineptitude: you're feeble and irritating, so practice your social graces. Don't make me come over there and choke off your oxygen bit. It's a long ways from saying "you have a lot of human potential, and not much experience, so let me help you confront the challenges in a meaningful way". These sayings leak a lot of sentiment about social engagement.

Every so often I have to pull up a chair beside a junior resource and go "Dude, you're jousting at windmills here, let's roll that change back and try again. I know you can do better." Five minutes of war stories about how to shoot yourself in the foot six ways from Sunday is usually enough to rebalance the flywheel of self preservation.