Micro fusion and addressing modes

Question

I have found something unexpected (to me) using the Intel® Architecture Code Analyzer (IACA).

The following instruction using [base+index] addressing

addps xmm1, xmmword ptr [rsi+rax*1]

does not micro-fuse according to IACA. However, if I use [base+offset] like this

addps xmm1, xmmword ptr [rsi]

IACA reports that it does fuse.

Section 2-11 of the Intel optimization reference manual gives the following as an example "of micro-fused micro-ops that can be handled by all decoders"

FADD DOUBLE PTR [RDI + RSI*8]

and Agner Fog's optimization assembly manual also gives examples of micro-op fusion using [base+index] addressing. See, for example, Section 12.2 "Same example on Core2". So what's the correct answer?

Answer 1

In the decoders and uop-cache, addressing mode doesn't affect micro-fusion (except that an instruction with an immediate operand can't micro-fuse a RIP-relative addressing mode).

But some combinations of uop and addressing mode can't stay micro-fused in the ROB (in the out-of-order core), so Intel SnB-family CPUs "un-laminate" when necessary, at some point before the issue/rename stage. For issue-throughput, and out-of-order window size (ROB-size), fused-domain uop count after un-lamination is what matters.

Intel's optimization manual describes un-lamination for Sandybridge in Section E.2.2.4: Micro-op Queue and the Loop Stream Detector (LSD), but doesn't describe the changes for any later microarchitectures.

UPDATE: Now Intel manual has a detailed section to describe un-lamination for Haswell. See section E.1.5 Unlamination. And a brief description for SandyBridge is in section E.2.2.4.

---

The rules, as best I can tell from experiments on SnB, HSW, and SKL:

• SnB (and I assume also IvB): indexed addressing modes are always un-laminated, others stay micro-fused. IACA is (mostly?) correct.
• HSW, SKL: These only keep an indexed ALU instruction micro-fused if it has 2 operands and treats the dst register as read-modify-write. Here "operands" includes flags, meaning that adc and cmov don't micro-fuse. Most VEX-encoded instructions also don't fuse since they generally have three operands (so paddb xmm0, [rdi+rbx] fuses but vpaddb xmm0, xmm0, [rdi+rbx] doesn't). Finally, the occasional 2-operand instruction where the first operand is write only, such as pabsb xmm0, [rax + rbx] also do not fuse. IACA is wrong, applying the SnB rules.

Related: simple (non-indexed) addressing modes are the only ones that the dedicated store-address unit on port7 (Haswell and later) can handle, so it's still potentially useful to avoid indexed addressing modes for stores. (A good trick for this is to address your dst with a single register, but src with dst+(initial_src-initial_dst). Then you only have to increment the dst register inside a loop.)

Note that some instructions never micro-fuse at all (even in the decoders/uop-cache). e.g. shufps xmm, [mem], imm8, or vinsertf128 ymm, ymm, [mem], imm8, are always 2 uops on SnB through Skylake, even though their register-source versions are only 1 uop. This is typical for instructions with an imm8 control operand plus the usual dest/src1, src2 register/memory operands, but there are a few other cases. e.g. PSRLW/D/Q xmm,[mem] (vector shift count from a memory operand) doesn't micro-fuse, and neither does PMULLD.

See also this post on Agner Fog's blog for discussion about issue throughput limits on HSW/SKL when you read lots of registers: Lots of micro-fusion with indexed addressing modes can lead to slowdowns vs. the same instructions with fewer register operands: one-register addressing modes and immediates. We don't know the cause yet, but I suspect some kind of register-read limit, maybe related to reading lots of cold registers from the PRF.

---

Test cases, numbers from real measurements: These all micro-fuse in the decoders, AFAIK, even if they're later un-laminated.

# store
mov        [rax], edi  SnB/HSW/SKL: 1 fused-domain, 2 unfused.  The store-address uop can run on port7.
mov    [rax+rsi], edi  SnB: unlaminated.  HSW/SKL: stays micro-fused.  (The store-address can't use port7, though).
mov [buf +rax*4], edi  SnB: unlaminated.  HSW/SKL: stays micro-fused.

# normal ALU stuff
add    edx, [rsp+rsi]  SnB: unlaminated.  HSW/SKL: stays micro-fused.  
# I assume the majority of traditional/normal ALU insns are like add

Three-input instructions that HSW/SKL may have to un-laminate

vfmadd213ps xmm0,xmm0,[rel buf] HSW/SKL: stays micro-fused: 1 fused, 2 unfused.
vfmadd213ps xmm0,xmm0,[rdi]     HSW/SKL: stays micro-fused
vfmadd213ps xmm0,xmm0,[0+rdi*4] HSW/SKL: un-laminated: 2 uops in fused & unfused-domains.
     (So indexed addressing mode is still the condition for HSW/SKL, same as documented by Intel for SnB)

# no idea why this one-source BMI2 instruction is unlaminated
# It's different from ADD in that its destination is write-only (and it uses a VEX encoding)
blsi   edi, [rdi]       HSW/SKL: 1 fused-domain, 2 unfused.
blsi   edi, [rdi+rsi]   HSW/SKL: 2 fused & unfused-domain.


adc         eax, [rdi] same as cmov r, [rdi]
cmove       ebx, [rdi]   Stays micro-fused.  (SnB?)/HSW: 2 fused-domain, 3 unfused domain.  
                         SKL: 1 fused-domain, 2 unfused.

# I haven't confirmed that this micro-fuses in the decoders, but I'm assuming it does since a one-register addressing mode does.

adc   eax, [rdi+rsi] same as cmov r, [rdi+rsi]
cmove ebx, [rdi+rax]  SnB: untested, probably 3 fused&unfused-domain.
                      HSW: un-laminated to 3 fused&unfused-domain.  
                      SKL: un-laminated to 2 fused&unfused-domain.

I assume that Broadwell behaves like Skylake for adc/cmov.

It's strange that HSW un-laminates memory-source ADC and CMOV. Maybe Intel didn't get around to changing that from SnB before they hit the deadline for shipping Haswell.

Agner's insn table says cmovcc r,m and adc r,m don't micro-fuse at all on HSW/SKL, but that doesn't match my experiments. The cycle counts I'm measuring match up with the the fused-domain uop issue count, for a 4 uops / clock issue bottleneck. Hopefully he'll double-check that and correct the tables.

Memory-dest integer ALU:

add        [rdi], eax  SnB: untested (Agner says 2 fused-domain, 4 unfused-domain (load + ALU  + store-address + store-data)
                       HSW/SKL: 2 fused-domain, 4 unfused.
add    [rdi+rsi], eax  SnB: untested, probably 4 fused & unfused-domain
                       HSW/SKL: 3 fused-domain, 4 unfused.  (I don't know which uop stays fused).
                  HSW: About 0.95 cycles extra store-forwarding latency vs. [rdi] for the same address used repeatedly.  (6.98c per iter, up from 6.04c for [rdi])
                  SKL: 0.02c extra latency (5.45c per iter, up from 5.43c for [rdi]), again in a tiny loop with dec ecx/jnz


adc     [rdi], eax      SnB: untested
                        HSW: 4 fused-domain, 6 unfused-domain.  (same-address throughput 7.23c with dec, 7.19c with sub ecx,1)
                        SKL: 4 fused-domain, 6 unfused-domain.  (same-address throughput ~5.25c with dec, 5.28c with sub)
adc     [rdi+rsi], eax  SnB: untested
                        HSW: 5 fused-domain, 6 unfused-domain.  (same-address throughput = 7.03c)
                        SKL: 5 fused-domain, 6 unfused-domain.  (same-address throughput = ~5.4c with sub ecx,1 for the loop branch, or 5.23c with dec ecx for the loop branch.)

Yes, that's right, adc [rdi],eax / dec ecx / jnz runs faster than the same loop with add instead of adc on SKL. I didn't try using different addresses, since clearly SKL doesn't like repeated rewrites of the same address (store-forwarding latency higher than expected. See also this post about repeated store/reload to the same address being slower than expected on SKL.

Memory-destination adc is so many uops because Intel P6-family (and apparently SnB-family) can't keep the same TLB entries for all the uops of a multi-uop instruction, so it needs an extra uop to work around the problem-case where the load and add complete, and then the store faults, but the insn can't just be restarted because CF has already been updated. Interesting series of comments from Andy Glew (@krazyglew).

Presumably fusion in the decoders and un-lamination later saves us from needing microcode ROM to produce more than 4 fused-domain uops from a single instruction for adc [base+idx], reg.

---

Why SnB-family un-laminates:

Sandybridge simplified the internal uop format to save power and transistors (along with making the major change to using a physical register file, instead of keeping input / output data in the ROB). SnB-family CPUs only allow a limited number of input registers for a fused-domain uop in the out-of-order core. For SnB/IvB, that limit is 2 inputs (including flags). For HSW and later, the limit is 3 inputs for a uop. I'm not sure if memory-destination add and adc are taking full advantage of that, or if Intel had to get Haswell out the door with some instructions

Nehalem and earlier have a limit of 2 inputs for an unfused-domain uop, but the ROB can apparently track micro-fused uops with 3 input registers (the non-memory register operand, base, and index).

---

So indexed stores and ALU+load instructions can still decode efficiently (not having to be the first uop in a group), and don't take extra space in the uop cache, but otherwise the advantages of micro-fusion are essentially gone for tuning tight loops. "un-lamination" happens before the 4-fused-domain-uops-per-cycle issue/retire width out-of-order core. The fused-domain performance counters (uops_issued / uops_retired.retire_slots) count fused-domain uops after un-lamination.

Intel's description of the renamer (Section 2.3.3.1: Renamer) implies that it's the issue/rename stage which actually does the un-lamination, so uops destined for un-lamination may still be micro-fused in the 28/56/64 fused-domain uop issue queue / loop-buffer (aka the IDQ).

TODO: test this. Make a loop that should just barely fit in the loop buffer. Change something so one of the uops will be un-laminated before issuing, and see if it still runs from the loop buffer (LSD), or if all the uops are now re-fetched from the uop cache (DSB). There are perf counters to track where uops come from, so this should be easy.

Harder TODO: if un-lamination happens between reading from the uop cache and adding to the IDQ, test whether it can ever reduce uop-cache bandwidth. Or if un-lamination happens right at the issue stage, can it hurt issue throughput? (i.e. how does it handle the leftover uops after issuing the first 4.)

---

(See the a previous version of this answer for some guesses based on tuning some LUT code, with some notes on vpgatherdd being about 1.7x more cycles than a pinsrw loop.)

Experimental testing on SnB

The HSW/SKL numbers were measured on an i5-4210U and an i7-6700k. Both had HT enabled (but the system idle so the thread had the whole core to itself). I ran the same static binaries on both systems, Linux 4.10 on SKL and Linux 4.8 on HSW, using ocperf.py. (The HSW laptop NFS-mounted my SKL desktop's /home.)

The SnB numbers were measured as described below, on an i5-2500k which is no longer working.

Confirmed by testing with performance counters for uops and cycles.

I found a table of PMU events for Intel Sandybridge, for use with Linux's perf command. (Standard perf unfortunately doesn't have symbolic names for most hardware-specific PMU events, like uops.) I made use of it for a recent answer.

ocperf.py provides symbolic names for these uarch-specific PMU events, so you don't have to look up tables. Also, the same symbolic name works across multiple uarches. I wasn't aware of it when I first wrote this answer.

To test for uop micro-fusion, I constructed a test program that is bottlenecked on the 4-uops-per-cycle fused-domain limit of Intel CPUs. To avoid any execution-port contention, many of these uops are nops, which still sit in the uop cache and go through the pipeline the same as any other uop, except they don't get dispatched to an execution port. (An xor x, same, or an eliminated move, would be the same.)

Test program: yasm -f elf64 uop-test.s && ld uop-test.o -o uop-test

GLOBAL _start
_start:
    xor eax, eax
    xor ebx, ebx
    xor edx, edx
    xor edi, edi
    lea rsi, [rel mydata]   ; load pointer
    mov ecx, 10000000
    cmp dword [rsp], 2      ; argc >= 2
    jge .loop_2reg

ALIGN 32
.loop_1reg:
    or eax, [rsi + 0]
    or ebx, [rsi + 4]
    dec ecx
    nop
    nop
    nop
    nop
    jg .loop_1reg
;   xchg r8, r9     ; no effect on flags; decided to use NOPs instead

    jmp .out

ALIGN 32
.loop_2reg:
    or eax, [rsi + 0 + rdi]
    or ebx, [rsi + 4 + rdi]
    dec ecx
    nop
    nop
    nop
    nop
    jg .loop_2reg

.out:
    xor edi, edi
    mov eax, 231    ;  exit(0)
    syscall

SECTION .rodata
mydata:
db 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff

I also found that the uop bandwidth out of the loop buffer isn't a constant 4 per cycle, if the loop isn't a multiple of 4 uops. (i.e. it's abc, abc, ...; not abca, bcab, ...). Agner Fog's microarch doc unfortunately wasn't clear on this limitation of the loop buffer. See Is performance reduced when executing loops whose uop count is not a multiple of processor width? for more investigation on HSW/SKL. SnB may be worse than HSW in this case, but I'm not sure and don't still have working SnB hardware.

I wanted to keep macro-fusion (compare-and-branch) out of the picture, so I used nops between the dec and the branch. I used 4 nops, so with micro-fusion, the loop would be 8 uops, and fill the pipeline with at 2 cycles per 1 iteration.

In the other version of the loop, using 2-operand addressing modes that don't micro-fuse, the loop will be 10 fused-domain uops, and run in 3 cycles.

Results from my 3.3GHz Intel Sandybridge (i5 2500k). I didn't do anything to get the cpufreq governor to ramp up clock speed before testing, because cycles are cycles when you aren't interacting with memory. I've added annotations for the performance counter events that I had to enter in hex.

testing the 1-reg addressing mode: no cmdline arg

$ perf stat -e task-clock,cycles,instructions,r1b1,r10e,r2c2,r1c2,stalled-cycles-frontend,stalled-cycles-backend ./uop-test

Performance counter stats for './uop-test':

     11.489620      task-clock (msec)         #    0.961 CPUs utilized
    20,288,530      cycles                    #    1.766 GHz
    80,082,993      instructions              #    3.95  insns per cycle
                                              #    0.00  stalled cycles per insn
    60,190,182      r1b1  ; UOPS_DISPATCHED: (unfused-domain.  1->umask 02 -> uops sent to execution ports from this thread)
    80,203,853      r10e  ; UOPS_ISSUED: fused-domain
    80,118,315      r2c2  ; UOPS_RETIRED: retirement slots used (fused-domain)
   100,136,097      r1c2  ; UOPS_RETIRED: ALL (unfused-domain)
       220,440      stalled-cycles-frontend   #    1.09% frontend cycles idle
       193,887      stalled-cycles-backend    #    0.96% backend  cycles idle

   0.011949917 seconds time elapsed

testing the 2-reg addressing mode: with a cmdline arg

$ perf stat -e task-clock,cycles,instructions,r1b1,r10e,r2c2,r1c2,stalled-cycles-frontend,stalled-cycles-backend ./uop-test x

 Performance counter stats for './uop-test x':

         18.756134      task-clock (msec)         #    0.981 CPUs utilized
        30,377,306      cycles                    #    1.620 GHz
        80,105,553      instructions              #    2.64  insns per cycle
                                                  #    0.01  stalled cycles per insn
        60,218,693      r1b1  ; UOPS_DISPATCHED: (unfused-domain.  1->umask 02 -> uops sent to execution ports from this thread)
       100,224,654      r10e  ; UOPS_ISSUED: fused-domain
       100,148,591      r2c2  ; UOPS_RETIRED: retirement slots used (fused-domain)
       100,172,151      r1c2  ; UOPS_RETIRED: ALL (unfused-domain)
           307,712      stalled-cycles-frontend   #    1.01% frontend cycles idle
         1,100,168      stalled-cycles-backend    #    3.62% backend  cycles idle

       0.019114911 seconds time elapsed

So, both versions ran 80M instructions, and dispatched 60M uops to execution ports. (or with a memory source dispatches to an ALU for the or, and a load port for the load, regardless of whether it was micro-fused or not in the rest of the pipeline. nop doesn't dispatch to an execution port at all.) Similarly, both versions retire 100M unfused-domain uops, because the 40M nops count here.

The difference is in the counters for the fused-domain.

1. The 1-register address version only issues and retires 80M fused-domain uops. This is the same as the number of instructions. Each insn turns into one fused-domain uop.
2. The 2-register address version issues 100M fused-domain uops. This is the same as the number of unfused-domain uops, indicating that no micro-fusion happened.

I suspect that you'd only see a difference between UOPS_ISSUED and UOPS_RETIRED(retirement slots used) if branch mispredicts led to uops being cancelled after issue, but before retirement.

And finally, the performance impact is real. The non-fused version took 1.5x as many clock cycles. This exaggerates the performance difference compared to most real cases. The loop has to run in a whole number of cycles (on Sandybridge where the LSD is less sophisticated), and the 2 extra uops push it from 2 to 3. Often, an extra 2 fused-domain uops will make less difference. And potentially no difference, if the code is bottlecked by something other than 4-fused-domain-uops-per-cycle.

Still, code that makes a lot of memory references in a loop might be faster if implemented with a moderate amount of unrolling and incrementing multiple pointers which are used with simple [base + immediate offset] addressing, instead of the using [base + index] addressing modes.

Further stuff

• Bottleneck when using indexed addressing modes - un-lamination may slow down the front-end more than an extra 1 uop normally would.

---

RIP-relative with an immediate can't micro-fuse. Agner Fog's testing shows that this is the case even in the decoders / uop-cache, so they never fuse in the first place (rather than being un-laminated).

IACA gets this wrong, and claims that both of these micro-fuse:

cmp dword  [abs mydata], 0x1b   ; fused counters != unfused counters (micro-fusion happened, and wasn't un-laminated).  Uses 2 entries in the uop-cache, according to Agner Fog's testing
cmp dword  [rel mydata], 0x1b   ; fused counters ~= unfused counters (micro-fusion didn't happen)

(There are some more limits for micro+macro fusion to both happen for a cmp/jcc. TODO: write that up for testing a memory location.)

RIP-rel does micro-fuse (and stay fused) when there's no immediate, e.g.:

or  eax, dword  [rel mydata]    ; fused counters != unfused counters, i.e. micro-fusion happens

---

Micro-fusion doesn't increase the latency of an instruction. The load can issue before the other input is ready.

ALIGN 32
.dep_fuse:
    or eax, [rsi + 0]
    or eax, [rsi + 0]
    or eax, [rsi + 0]
    or eax, [rsi + 0]
    or eax, [rsi + 0]
    dec ecx
    jg .dep_fuse

This loop runs at 5 cycles per iteration, because of the eax dep chain. No faster than a sequence of or eax, [rsi + 0 + rdi], or mov ebx, [rsi + 0 + rdi] / or eax, ebx. (The unfused and the mov versions both run the same number of uops.) Scheduling / dep checking happens in the unfused-domain. Newly issued uops go into the scheduler (aka Reservation Station (RS)) as well as the ROB. They leave the scheduler after dispatching (aka being sent to an execution unit), but stay in the ROB until retirement. So the out-of-order window for hiding load latency is at least the scheduler size (54 unfused-domain uops in Sandybridge, 60 in Haswell, 97 in Skylake).

Micro-fusion doesn't have a shortcut for the base and offset being the same register. A loop with or eax, [mydata + rdi+4*rdi] (where rdi is zeroed) runs as many uops and cycles as the loop with or eax, [rsi+rdi]. This addressing mode could be used for iterating over an array of odd-sized structs starting at a fixed address. This is probably never used in most programs, so it's no surprise that Intel didn't spend transistors on allowing this special-case of 2-register modes to micro-fuse. (And Intel documents it as "indexed addressing modes" anyway, where a register and scale factor are needed.)

---

Macro-fusion of a cmp/jcc or dec/jcc creates a uop that stays as a single uop even in the unfused-domain. dec / nop / jge can still run in a single cycle but is three uops instead of one.

Answer 2

Note: Since I wrote this answer, Peter tested Haswell and Skylake as well and integrated the results into the accepted answer above (in particular, most of the improvements I attribute to Skylake below seem to have actually appeared in Haswell). You should see that answer for the rundown of behavior across CPUs and this answer (although not wrong) is mostly of historical interest.

My testing indicates that on Skylake at least¹, the processor fully fuses even complex addressing modes, unlike Sandybridge.

That is, the 1-arg and 2-arg versions of the code posted above by Peter run in the same number of cycles, with the same number of uops dispatched and retired.

My results:

Performance counter stats for ./uop-test:

     23.718772      task-clock (msec)         #    0.973 CPUs utilized          
    20,642,233      cycles                    #    0.870 GHz                    
    80,111,957      instructions              #    3.88  insns per cycle        
    60,253,831      uops_executed_thread      # 2540.344 M/sec                  
    80,295,685      uops_issued_any           # 3385.322 M/sec                  
    80,176,940      uops_retired_retire_slots # 3380.316 M/sec                  

   0.024376698 seconds time elapsed

Performance counter stats for ./uop-test x:

     13.532440      task-clock (msec)         #    0.967 CPUs utilized          
    21,592,044      cycles                    #    1.596 GHz                    
    80,073,676      instructions              #    3.71  insns per cycle        
    60,144,749      uops_executed_thread      # 4444.487 M/sec                  
    80,162,360      uops_issued_any           # 5923.718 M/sec                  
    80,104,978      uops_retired_retire_slots # 5919.478 M/sec                  

   0.013997088 seconds time elapsed

Performance counter stats for ./uop-test x x:

     16.672198      task-clock (msec)         #    0.981 CPUs utilized          
    27,056,453      cycles                    #    1.623 GHz                    
    80,083,140      instructions              #    2.96  insns per cycle        
    60,164,049      uops_executed_thread      # 3608.645 M/sec                  
   100,187,390      uops_issued_any           # 6009.249 M/sec                  
   100,118,409      uops_retired_retire_slots # 6005.112 M/sec                  

   0.016997874 seconds time elapsed

I didn't find any UOPS_RETIRED_ANY instruction on Skylake, only the "retired slots" guy which is apparently fused-domain.

The final test (uop-test x x) is a variant that Peter suggestions which uses a RIP-relative cmp with immediate, which is known not to microfuse:

.loop_riprel
    cmp dword [rel mydata], 1
    cmp dword [rel mydata], 2
    dec ecx
    nop
    nop
    nop
    nop
    jg .loop_riprel

The results show that the extra 2 uops per cycle are picked up by the uops issued and retired counters (hence the test can differentiate between fusion occurring, and not).

More tests on other architectures are welcome! You can find the code (copied from Peter above) in github.

---

[1] ... and perhaps some other architectures in-between Skylake and Sandybridge, since Peter only tested SB and I only tested SKL.

Answer 3

Older Intel processors without a uop cache can do the fusion, so maybe this is a drawback of the uop cache. I don't have the time to test this right now, but I will add a test for uop fusion next time I update my test scripts. Have you tried with FMA instructions? They are the only instructions that allow 3 input dependencies in an unfused uop.

Answer 4

I have now reviewed test results for Intel Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell and Broadwell. I have not had access to test on a Skylake yet. The results are:

• Instructions with two-register addressing and three input dependencies are fusing allright. They take only one entry in the micro-operation cache as long as they contain no more than 32 bits of data (or 2 * 16 bits).
• It is possible to make instructions with four input dependencies, using fused multiply-and-add instructions on Haswell and Broadwell. These instructions still fuse into a single micro-op and take only one entry in the micro-op cache.
• Instructions with more than 32 bits of data, for example 32 bits address and 8 bits immediate data can still fuse, but use two entries in the micro-operation cache (unless the 32 bits can be compressed into a 16-bit signed integer)
• Instructions with rip-relative addressing and an immediate constant are not fusing, even if both the offset and the immediate constant are very small.
• All the results are identical on the four machines tested.
• The tests were performed with my own test programs using the performance monitoring counters on loops that were sufficiently small to fit into the micro-op cache.

Your results may be due to other factors. I have not tried to use the IACA.