Eliminate 64-kbyte aliased data accesses, Eliminate 64-kbyte aliased data accesses -42 – Intel ARCHITECTURE IA-32 User Manual

Page 388

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IA-32 Intel® Architecture Optimization

7-42

Eliminate 64-KByte Aliased Data Accesses

The 64 KB aliasing condition is discussed in Chapter 2. Memory
accesses that satisfy the 64 KB aliasing condition can cause excessive
evictions of the first-level data cache. Eliminating 64-KB-aliased data
accesses originating from each thread helps improve frequency scaling
in general. Furthermore, it enables the first-level data cache to perform
efficiently when Hyper-Threading Technology is fully utilized by
software applications.

User/Source Coding Rule 34. (H impact, H generality) Minimize data
access patterns that are offset by multiples of 64 KB in each thread.

The presence of 64-KB-aliased data access can be detected using
Pentium 4 processor performance monitoring events. Appendix B
includes an updated list of Pentium 4 processor performance metrics.
These metrics are based on events accessed using the Intel VTune
performance analyzer.

Performance penalties associated with 64 KB aliasing are applicable
mainly to current processor implementations of Hyper-Threading
Technology or Intel NetBurst microarchitecture. The next section
discusses memory optimization techniques that are applicable to
multithreaded applications running on processors supporting
Hyper-Threading Technology.

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