GCC 8 Hasn't Been Performing As Fast As It Should For Skylake With "-march=native"

Written by Michael Larabel in GNU on 12 July 2018 at 05:02 PM EDT. 14 Comments
GNU
It turns out that when using GCC 8 since April (or GCC 9 development code) if running on Intel Skylake (or newer architectures like the yet-to-be-out Cannonlake or Icelake) and compile your code with the "-march=native" flag for what should tune for your CPU microarchitecture's full capabilities, that hasn't entirely been the case. A fix is en route that can correct the performance by as much as 60%.

H.J. Lu of Intel posted a patch today for properly tuning Skylake, Cannonlake. and Icelake targets when using the "-march=native" option. He explained on the just-posted patch:
r259399, which added PROCESSOR_SKYLAKE, disabled many x86 optimizations which are enabled by PROCESSOR_HASWELL. As the result, -mtune=skylake generates slower codes on Skylake than before. The same also applies to Cannonlake and [Icelake] tuning.

This patch changes -mtune={skylake|cannonlake|icelake} to tune like -mtune=haswell for until their tuning is properly adjusted. It also enables -mprefer-vector-width=256 for -mtune=haswell, which has no impact on codegen when AVX512 isn't enabled.
...
This patch improves -march=native performance on Skylake up to 60% and leaves -march=native performance unchanged on Haswell.

That revision to GCC was made back in April that caused -march=native to not be exploited to its full potential on Skylake and newer. Thus it is part of the current stable GCC 8.1 release. Though if you don't use the "-march=native" flag, are still on GCC 7, etc, the performance still should be the same. With often using "-march=native" for benchmark comparisons, it will be interesting to re-check GCC 8's performance on Skylake+ once this patch is merged in presumably the very near future.

Update: Fun fact is that this issue turns out it was uncovered using the Phoronix Test Suite.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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