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Is ARM Hungry Enough to Eat Intel's Favorite Pie?

Francesc Alted — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 10:12:20 GMT

Note: This entry is a follow-up of the Breaking Down Memory Walls blog. Please make sure that you have read it if you want to fully understand all the benchmarks performed here.

At the beginning of the 1990s the computing world was mainly using RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) architectures, namely SPARC, Alpha, Power and MIPS CPUs for performing serious calculations and Intel CPUs were seen as something that was appropriate just to run essentially personal applications on PCs, but almost nobody was thinking about them as a serious contender for server environments. But Intel had an argument that almost nobody was ready to recognize how important it could become; with its dominance of the PC market it quickly ranked to be the largest CPU maker in the world and, with such an enormous revenue, Intel played its cards well and, by the beginning of 2000s, they were able to make of its CISC architecture (Complex Instruction Set Computer) the one with the best compute/price ratio, clearly beating the RISC offerings at that time. That amazing achievement shut the mouths of CISC critics (to the point that nowadays almost everybody recognizes that performance has very little to do with using RISC or CISC) and cleared the path for Intel to dominate not only the PC world, but also the world of server computing for the next 20 years.

Fast forward to the beginning of 2010s, with Intel clearly dominating the market of CPUs for servers. However, at the same time something potentially disruptive happened: the market for mobile and embedded systems exploded making the ARM architecture the most widely used architecture in this area. By 2017, with over 100 billion ARM processors produced, ARM was already the most widely used architecture in the world. Now, the smart reader will have noted here a clear parallelism between the situation of Intel at the end of 1990s and ARM at the end of 2010s: both companies were responsible of the design of the most used CPUs in the world. There was an important difference though: while Intel was able to implement its own designs, ARM was leaving the implementation job to third party vendors. Of course, this fact will have consequences on the way ARM will be competing with Intel (see below).

ARM Plans for Improving CPU Performance

So with ARM CPUs dominating the world of mobile and embedded, the question is whether ARM would be interested in having a stab at the client market (laptops and PC desktops) and, by extension, to the server computing market during the 2020s decade or they would renounce to that because they comfortable enough with the current situation? In 2018 ARM provided an important hint to answer this question: they really want to push hard for the client market with the introduction of the Cortex A76 CPU which aspires to redefine the capability of ARM to compete with Intel at its own game:

On the other hand, the fact that ARM is not just providing licenses to use its IP cores, but also the possibility to buy an architectural licence for vendors to design their own CPU cores using the ARM instruction sets makes possible that other players like Apple, AppliedMicro, Broadcom, Cavium (now Marvell), Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Samsung Electronics can produce ARM CPUs that can be adapted to be used in different scenarios. One example that is interesting for this discussion is Marvell who, with its ThunderX2 CPU, is already entering into the computing servers market --actually, a new super-computer with more than 100,000 ThunderX2 cores has recently entered into the TOP500 ranking; this is the first time that an ARM-based computer enters that list, overwhelmingly dominated by Intel architectures for almost two decades now.

In the next sections we are trying to bring more hints (experimentally tested) on whether ARM (and its licensees) are fulfilling their promise, or their claims were just bare marketing. For checking this, I was able to use two recent (2018) implementations of the ARMv8-A architecture, one meant for the client market and the other for servers, replicated the benchmarks of my previous Breaking Down Memory Walls blog entry and extracted some interesting results. Keep reading.

The Kirin 980 CPU

Here we are going to analyze Huawei's Kirin 980 CPU , a SoC (System On a Chip) that uses the ARM A76 core internally. This is a fine example of an internal IP core design of ARM that is licensed to be used in a CPU chipset (or SoC) by another vendor (Huawei in this case). The Kirin 980 wears 4 A76 cores plus 4 A55 cores, but the more powerful ones are the A76 (the A55 are more headed to do light tasks with very little energy consumption, which is critical for phones). The A76 core is designed to be implemented using a 7nm technology (as it is the case for the Kirin 980, the second SoC in the world to use a 7 nm node, after Apple A12), and supports ARM's DynamIQ technology which allows scalability to target the specific requirements of a SoC. In our case the Kirin 980 is running in a phone (Humawei's Mate 20), and in this scenario the power dissipation (TDP) cannot exceed the 4 W figure, so DynamIQ should try to be very conservative here and avoid putting too many cores active at the same time.

ARM is saying that they designed the A76 to be a competitor of the Intel Skylake Core i5, so this is what we are going to check here. For this, we are going to compare a Kirin 980 in a Huawei Mate 20 phone against a Core i5 included in a MacBook Pro (late 2016). Here it is the side-by-side performance for the precipitation dataset that I used in the previous blog:

Here we can already see a couple of things. First, the speed of the calculation when there is no compression is similar for both CPUs. This is interesting because, although the bottleneck for this benchmark is in the memory access, the fact that the Kirin 980 performance is almost the same than the Core i5 is a testimony of how well ARM performed in the design of a memory prefetcher, clearly allowing for a good memory-level parallelism.

Second, for the compressed case, the Core i5 is still a 50% faster than the Kirin 980, but the performance scales similarly (up to 4 threads) for both CPUs. The big news here is that the Core i5 has a TDP of 28 W, whereas for the Kirin 980 is just 4 W (and probably less than that), so that means that ARM's DynamIQ works beautifully so as to allow 4 (powerful) cores to run simultaneously in such a restrictive scenario (remember that we are running this benchmark inside a phone). It is also true that we are comparing an Intel CPU from 2016 against an ARM CPU from 2018 and that nowadays probably we can find Intel exemplars showing a similar performance than this i5 for probably no more than 10 W (e.g. an i5-8265U with configurable TDP-down), although I am not really sure how an Intel CPU will perform with such a strict power constraint. At any rate, the Kirin 980 still consumes less than half of the power than its Intel counterpart --and its price would probably be a fraction of it too.

I believe that these facts are really a good testimony of how serious ARM was on their claim that they were going to catch Intel in the performance side of the things for client devices, and probably with an important advantage in consuming less energy too. The fact that ARM CPUs are more energy efficient should not be surprising given the experience of ARM in that area for decades. But another reason for that is the important reduction in the manufacturing technology that ARM has achieved on their new designs (7nm node for ARM vs 14nm node for Intel); undoubtedly, ARM advantage in power consumption is going to be important for their world-domination plans.

The ThunderX2 CPU

The second way in which ARM sells licenses is the so-called architectural license allowing companies to design their own CPU cores using the ARM instruction sets. Cavium (now bought by Marvell) was one of these companies, and they produced different CPU designs that culminated with Vulcan, the micro-architecture that powers the ThunderX2 CPU, which was made available in May 2018. Vulcan is a 16 nm high-performance 64-bit ARM micro-architecture that is specifically meant to compete in compute/data server facilities (think of it as a a Xeon-class ARM-based server microprocessor). ThunderX2 can pack up to 32 Vulcan cores, and as every Vulcan core supports up to 4 threads, the whole CPU can run up to 128 threads. With its capability to handle so many threads simultaneously, I expected that its raw compute power should be nothing to sneeze at.

So as to check how powerful a ThunderX2 can be, we are going to compare ThunderX2 CN9975 (actually a box with 2 instances of it, each containing 28 cores) against one of its natural competitor, the Intel Scalable Gold 5120 (actually a box with 2 instances of it, each containing 14 cores):

Here we see that, when no compression is used, the Intel instance scales much better and more predictably; however the ThunderX2 is able to reach a similar performance (almost 70 GB/s) than the Intel when enough threads are thrown at the computing task. This is a really interesting fact, because it is showing that, for first time ever, an ARM CPU can match the memory bandwidth of a latest generation Intel CPU (which BTW, was pretty good at that already).

Regarding the compressed scenario, Intel Scalable still performs more than 2x faster than the ThunderX2 and it continues to show a really nice scalability. On the other hand, although the ThunderX2 represents a good step in improving the performance of the ARM architecture, it is still quite far from being able to reach Intel in terms of both raw computing performance and the capacity to scale smoothly.

When we look at power consumption, although I was not able to find the exact figure for the ThunderX2 CN9975 model that has been used in the benchmarks above, it is probably in the range of 150 W per CPU, which is quite larger than its Intel Scalable 5120 counterpart which is around 100 W per CPU. That means that Intel is using quite far less power in their CPU, giving them a clear advantage in server computing at this time.

Final Thoughts

From these results, it is quite evident that ARM is making large strides in catching Intel performance, specially in the client side of the things (laptops, and PC desktops), with an important reduction in power consumption, which is specially important for laptops. Keep these facts in mind when you are going to buy your next laptop or desktop PC and do not blindly assume that Intel is the only reasonable option anymore ;-)

On the server side, Intel still holds an important advantage though, and it will not be easy to take the performance crown away from them. However, the fact that ARM is allowing different vendors to produce their own implementations means that the competition can be more specific and each vendor is free to tackle different aspects of server computing. So it is not difficult to realize that in the next few years we are going to see new ARM exemplars that would be meant not only for crunching numbers, but that will also specialize in different tasks, like storing and serving big data, routing data or performing artificial intelligence, to just mention a few cases (for example, Marvell is trying to position the ThunderX2 more specifically for the data server scenario) that are going to put Intel architectures in difficulties to maintain its current dominance in the data centers.

Finally, we should not forget the fact that software developers (including myself) have been building high performance libraries using exclusively Intel boxes for decades, so making them extremely efficient for Intel architectures. If, as we have seen here, ARM architectures are going to be an alternative in the performance client and server scenarios, then software developers will have to increasingly adopt ARM boxes as part of their tooling so as to continue being competitive in a world that is quite likely it won't necessarily be ruled by Intel anymore.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Packet, a provider of bare metal servers in the cloud (among other things) for allowing me not only to use their machines for free, but also helping me in different questions about the configuration of the machines. In particular, Ed Vielmetti has been instrumental in providing me early access to a ThunderX2 server, and making sure that everything was stable enough for the benchmark needs.

Appendix: Software used

For reference, here it is the software that has been used for this blog entry.

For the Kirin 980:

OS: Android 9 - Linux Kernel 4.9.97
Compiler: clang 7.0.0
C-Blosc2: 2.0.0a6.dev (2018-05-18)

For the ThunderX2:

OS: Ubuntu 18.04
Compiler: GCC 7.3.0
C-Blosc2: 2.0.0a6.dev (2018-05-18)

Breaking Down Memory Walls

Francesc Alted — Mon, 25 Jun 2018 18:32:20 GMT

Update (2018-08-09): An extended version of this blog post can be found in this article. On it, you will find a complementary study with synthetic data (mainly for finding ultimate performance limits), a more comprehensive set of CPUs has been used, as well as more discussion about the results.

Nowadays CPUs struggle to get data at enough speed to feed their cores. The reason for this is that memory speed is growing at a slower pace than CPUs increase their speed at crunching numbers. This memory slowness compared with CPUs is generally known as the Memory Wall.

For example, let's suppose that we want to compute the aggregation of a some large array; here it is how to do that using OpenMP for leveraging all cores in a CPU:

#pragma omp parallel for reduction (+:sum)
for (i = 0; i < N; i++) {
  sum += udata[i];
}

With this, some server (an Intel Xeon E3-1245 v5 @ 3.50GHz, with 4 physical cores and hyperthreading) takes about 14 ms for doing the aggregation of an array with 100 million of float32 values when using 8 OpenMP threads (optimal number for this CPU). However, if instead of bringing the whole 100 million elements from memory to the CPU we generate the data inside the loop, we are avoiding the data transmission between memory and CPU, like in:

#pragma omp parallel for reduction (+:sum)
for (i = 0; i < N; i++) {
  sum += (float)i;
}

This loop takes just 3.5 ms, that is, 4x less than the original one. That means that our CPU could compute the aggregation at a speed that is 4x faster than the speed at which the memory subsystem can provide data elements to the CPU; or put in another words, the CPU is idle, doing nothing during the 75% of the time, waiting for data to arrive (for this example, but there could be other, more extreme cases). Here we have the memory wall in action indeed.

That the memory wall exists is an excellent reason to think about ways to workaround it. One of the most promising venues is to use compression: what if we could store data in compressed state in-memory and use the spare clock cycles of the CPU for decompressing it just when it is needed? In this blog entry we will see how to implement such a computational kernel on top of data structures that are cache- and compression-friendly and we will examine how they perform on a range of modern CPU architectures. Some surprises are in store.

For demonstration purposes, I will run a simple task: summing up the same array of values than above but using a compressed dataset instead. While computing sums of values seems trivial, it exposes a couple of properties that are important for our discussion:

This is a memory-bounded task.
It is representative of many aggregation/reduction algorithms that are routinely used out in the wild.

Operating with Compressed Datasets

Now let's see how to run our aggregation efficiently when using compressed data. For this, we need:

A data container that supports on-the-flight compression.
A blocking algorithm that leverages the caches in CPUs.

As for the data container, we are going to use the super-chunk object that comes with the Blosc2 library. A super-chunk is a data structure that is meant to host many data chunks in a compressed form, and that has some interesting features; more specifically:

Compactness: everything in a super-chunk is designed to take as little space as possible, not only by using compression, but also my minimizing the amount of associated metadata (like indexes).
Small fragmentation: by splitting the data in large enough chunks that are contiguous, the resulting structure ends stored in memory with a pretty small amount of 'holes' in it, allowing a more efficient memory management by both the hardware and the software.
Support for contexts: useful when we have different threads and we want to decompress data simultaneously. Assigning a context per each thread is enough to allow the simultaneous use of the different cores without badly interfering with each other.
Easy access to chunks: an integer is assigned to the different chunks so that requesting a specific chunk is just a matter of specifying its number and then it gets decompressed and returned in one shot. So pointer arithmetic is replaced by indexing operations, making the code less prone to get severe errors (e.g. if a chunk does not exist, an error code is returned instead of creating a segmentation fault).

If you are curious on how the super-chunk can be created and used, just check the sources for the benchmark used for this blog.

Regarding the computing algorithm, I will use one that follows the principles of the blocking computing technique: for every chunk, bring it to the CPU, decompress it (so that it stays in cache), run all the necessary operations on it, and then proceed to the next chunk:

For implementation details, have a look at the benchmark sources.

Also, and in order to allow maximum efficiency when performing multi-threaded operations, the size of each chunk in the super-chunk should fit in non-shared caches (namely, L1 and L2 in modern CPUs). This optimization avoids concurrent access to bus caches as much as possible, thereby allowing dedicated access to data caches in each core.

For our experiments below, we are going to choose a chunksize of 4,000 elements because Blosc2 needs 2 internal buffers for performing the decompression besides the source and destination buffer. Also, we are using 32-bit (4 bytes) float values for our exercise, so the final size used in caches will be 4,000 * (2 + 2) * 4 = 64,000 bytes, which should fit comfortably in L2 caches in most modern CPU architectures (which normally sports 256 KB or even higher). Please note that finding an optimal value for this size might require some fine-tuning, not only for different architectures, but also for different datasets.

The Precipitation Dataset

There are plenty of datasets out there exposing different data distributions so, depending on your scenario, your mileage may vary. The dataset chosen here is the result of a regional reanalysis covering the European continent, and in particular, the precipitation data in a certain region of Europe. Computing the aggregation of this data is representative of a catchment average of precipitation over a drainage area.

Caveat: For the sake of easy reproducibility, for building the 100 million dataset I have chosen a small geographical area with a size of 150x150 and reused it repeatedly so as to fill the final dataset completely. As the size of the chunks is lesser than this area, and the super-chunk (as configured here) does not use data redundancies from other chunks, the results obtained here can be safely extrapolated to the actual dataset made from real data (bar some small differences).

Choosing the Compression Codec

When determining the best codec to use inside Blosc2 (it has support for BloscLZ, LZ4, LZ4HC, Zstd, Zlib and Lizard), it turns out that they behave quite differently, both in terms of compression and speed, with the dataset they have to compress and with the CPU architecture in which they run. This is quite usual, and the reason why you should always try to find the best codec for your use case. Here we have how the different codecs behaves for our precipitation dataset in terms of decompression speed for our reference platform (Intel Xeon E3-1245):

In this case LZ4HC is the codec that decompress faster for any number of threads and hence, the one selected for the benchmarks for the reference platform. A similar procedure has been followed to select the codec for the CPUs. The selected codec for every CPU will be conveniently specified in the discussion of the results below.

For completeness, I am also showing the compression ratios achieved by the different codecs for the precipitation dataset. Although there are significant differences for them, these usually come at the cost of compression/decompression time. At any rate, even though compression ratio is important, in this blog we are mainly interested in the best decompression speed, so we will use this latter as the only important parameter for codec selection.

Results on Different CPUs

Now it is time to see how our compressed sum algorithm performs compared with the original uncompressed one. However, as not all the CPUs are created equal, we are going to see how different CPUs perform doing exactly the same computation.

Reference CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1245 v5 4-Core processor @ 3.50GHz

This is a mainstream, somewhat 'small' processor for servers that has an excellent price/performance ratio. Its main virtue is that, due to its small core count, the CPU can be run at considerably high clock speeds which, combined with a high IPC (Instructions Per Clock) count, delivers considerable computational power. These results are a good baseline reference point for comparing other CPUs packing a larger number of cores (and hence, lower clock speeds). Here it is how it performs:

We see here that, even though the uncompressed dataset does not scale too well, the compressed dataset shows a nice scalability even when using using hyperthreading (> 4 threads); this is a remarkable fact for a feature (hyperthreading) that, despite marketing promises, does not always deliver 2x the performance of the physical cores. With that, the performance peak for the compressed precipitation dataset (22 GB/s, using LZ4HC) is really close to the uncompressed one (27 GB/s); quite an achievement for a CPU with just 4 physical cores.

AMD EPYC 7401P 24-Core Processor @ 2.0GHz

This CPU implements EPYC, one of the most powerful architectures ever created by AMD. It packs 24 physical cores, although internally they are split into 2 blocks with 12 cores each. Here is how it behaves:

Stalling at 4/8 threads, the EPYC scalability for the uncompressed dataset is definitely not good. On its hand, the compressed dataset behaves quite differently: it shows a nice scalability through the whole range of cores in the CPU (again, even when using hyperthreading), achieving the best performance (45 GB/s, using LZ4) at precisely 48 threads, well above the maximum performance reached by the uncompressed dataset (30 GB/s).

Intel Scalable Gold 5120 2x 14-Core Processor @ 2.2GHz

Here we have one of the latest and most powerful CPU architectures developed by Intel. We are testing it here within a machine with 2 CPUs, each containing 14 cores. Here’s it how it performed:

In this case, and stalling at 24/28 threads, the Intel Scalable shows a quite remarkable scalability for the uncompressed dataset (apparently, Intel has finally chosen a good name for an architecture; well done guys!). More importantly, it also reveals an even nicer scalability on the compressed dataset, all the way up to 56 threads (which is expected provided the 2x 14-core CPUs with hyperthreading); this is a remarkable feat for such a memory bandwidth beast. In absolute terms, the compressed dataset achieves a performance (68 GB/s, using LZ4) that is very close to the uncompressed one (72 GB/s).

Cavium ARMv8 2x 48-Core

We are used to seeing ARM architectures powering most of our phones and tablets, but seeing them performing computational duties is far more uncommon. This does not mean that there are not ARM implementations that cannot power big servers. Cavium, with its 48-core in a single CPU, is an example of a server-grade chip. In this case we are looking at a machine with two of these CPUs:

Again, we see a nice scalability (while a bit bumpy) for the uncompressed dataset, reaching its maximum (35 GB/s) at 40 threads. Regarding the compressed dataset, it scales much more smoothly, and we see how the performance peaks at 64 threads (15 GB/s, using BloscLZ) and then drops significantly after that point (even if the CPU still has enough cores to continue the scaling; I am not sure why is that). Incidentally, the BloscLZ codec being the best performer here is not a coincidence as it recently received a lot of fine-tuning for ARM.

What We Learned

We have explored how to use compression in an nearly optimal way to perform a very simple task: compute an aggregation out of a large dataset. With a basic understanding of the cache and memory subsystem, and by using appropriate compressed data structures (the super-chunk), we have seen how we can easily produce code that enables modern CPUs to perform operations on compressed data at a speed that approaches the speed of the same operations on uncompressed data (and sometimes exceeding it). More in particular:

Performance for the compressed dataset scales very well on the number of threads for all the CPUs (even hyper-threading seems very beneficial at that, which is a welcome surprise).
The CPUs that benefit the most from compression are those with relatively low memory bandwidth and CPUs with many cores. In particular, the EPYC architecture is a good example and we have shown how the compressed dataset can operate 50% faster that the uncompressed one.
Even when using CPUs with a low number of cores (e.g. our reference CPU, with only 4) we can achieve computational speeds on compressed data that can be on par with traditional, uncompressed computations, while saving precious amounts of memory and disk space.
The appropriate codec (and other parameters) to use within Blosc2 for maximum performance can vary depending on the dataset and the CPU used. Having a way to automatically discover the optimal compression parameters would be a nice addition to the Blosc2 library.

Final Thoughts

To conclude, it is interesting to remember here what Linus Torvalds said back in 2006 (talking about the git system that he created the year before):

[...] git actually has a simple design, with stable and reasonably well-documented data structures. In fact, I'm a huge proponent of designing your code around the data, rather than the other way around, and I think it's one of the reasons git has been fairly successful. [...] I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

Of course, we all know how drastic Linus can be in his statements, but I cannot agree more on how important is to adopt a data-driven view when designing our applications. But I'd go further and say that, when trying to squeeze the last drop of performance out of modern CPUs, data containers need to be structured in a way that leverages the characteristics of the underlying CPU, as well as to facilitate the application of the blocking technique (and thereby allowing compression to run efficiently). Hopefully, installments like this can help us explore new possibilities to break down the memory wall that bedevils modern computing.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my friend Scott Prater for his great advices on improving my writing style, Dirk Schwanenberg for pointing out to the precipitation dataset and for providing the script for reading it, and Robert McLeod, J. David Ibáñez and Javier Sancho for suggesting general improvements (even though some of their suggestions required such a big amount of work that made me ponder about their actual friendship :).

Appendix: Software used

For reference, here it is the software that has been used for this blog entry:

OS: Ubuntu 18.04
Compiler: GCC 7.3.0
C-Blosc2: 2.0.0a6.dev (2018-05-18)

Fine Tuning the BloscLZ codec

Francesc Alted — Fri, 14 Jul 2017 06:32:20 GMT

Yesterday I was reading about the exciting new CPU architectures that both AMD and Intel are introducing and I was wondering how the improved architecture of the new cores and most specially, its caches, could apply to Blosc. It turns out that I have access to a server with a relatively modern CPU (Xeon E3-1245 v5 @ 3.50GHz, with 4 physical cores) and I decided to have a go at fine-tune the included BloscLZ codec (the one that I know the best) inside C-Blosc2. Of course, I already spent some time tuning BloscLZ, but that was some years ago and provided the fast pace at which CPUs are evolving I thought that this was excellent timing for another round of fine-tuning, most specially in preparation for users adopting the forthcoming RYZEN, Threadripper, EPYC and Skylake-SP architectures.

Frankly speaking, I was expecting to get very little improvements in this front, but the results have been unexpectedly good. Keep reading.

Where we come from

Just for reference, here it is the performance of the BloscLZ codec in my server before the new tuning work:

That is the typical synthetic benchmark in Blosc, but for the plotting function in the C-Blosc2 project, the actual size of each compressed buffer is shown (and not the size of the whole dataset, as in C-Blosc1). In this case, the dataset (256 MB) is split in chunks of 4 MB, and provided that our CPU has a LLC (Last Level Cache) of 8 MB, this is sort of an optimal size for achieving maximum performance (the buffers meant for Blosc usually do not exceed 4 MB for most of its common usages).

As can be seen, performance is quite good, although compression ratios left something to be desired. Furthermore, for the maximum compression level (9), the compression ratio has a regression with respect to the previous level (8). This is not too bad, and sometimes happens in any codec, but the nice thing would be to avoid it if possible.

The new BloscLZ after fine tuning

So, after a couple of hours playing with different parameters in BloscLZ and C-Blosc2, I started to realize that the new Intel CPU performed exceedingly well when asked to compress more, to the point that high compression settings were not performing that slow in comparision with low compression ones; rather the contrary: high compression settings were operating at almost the same speed than lower ones (which was a welcome surprise indeed). Hence I tried to be set quite more aggressive parameters in BloscLZ, while trying to keep the size of internal blocks in Blosc2 below 256 KB (the typical size of L2 caches in modern CPUs). This is the result:

So the compression ratios have increased quite a bit, specially for the larger compression levels (going from less than 10x to more than 20x for this benchmark). This is courtesy of the new, more agressive compression parameters. Strikingly enough, performance has also increased in general, but specially for these large compression levels. I am not completely certain on why this is the case, but probably this new CPU architecture is much better at out-of-order execution and prefetching larger blocks of data, which benefits compressing both faster even in large buffers; similarly, I am pretty sure that improvements in compiler technology (I am using a recent GCC 6.3.0 here) is pretty important for getting faster binary code. We can also see that when using 4 threads (i.e. using all the physical cores available in our CPU at hand), BloscLZ can compress faster than a memcpy() call for most of the cases, and most specially at large compression levels, as mentioned before. Oh, and we can see that we also got rid of the regression in the compression ratio for compression level 9, which is cool.

Regarding decompression speed, we can see that the new tuning gave general speed-ups of between 10% and 20%, with no significant slowdowns in any case. All in all, quite good results indeed!

Room for more improvements? Enter PGO.

To temporary end (optimization is a never ending task) this quest for speed, I am curious about the speed that we can buy by using the PGO (Profile Guided Optimization) capability that is present in most of the modern compilers. Here I am going to use the PGO of GCC in combination with our benchmark at hand so as to provide the profile for the compiler optimizer. Here are the results when PGO is applied to the new parametrization:

So, while the speed improvement for compression is not significant (albeit a bit better), the big improvement comes in the decompression speed, where we see speeds almost reaching 50 GB/s and perhaps more interestingly, more than 35 GB/s for maximum compression level, and for first time in my life as Blosc developer, I can see the speed of decompressing with one single thread being faster than memcpy() for all the compression levels.

I wonder what the PGO technique can bring to other codecs in Blosc, but that is stuff for other blog post. At any rate, the reader is encouraged to try PGO on their own setups. I am pretty sure that she will be pleased to see nice speed improvements.

Appendix: Hardware and software used

For reference, here it is the configuration that I used for producing the plots in this blog entry.

CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1245 v5 @ 3.50GHz (4 physical cores with hyper-threading)
OS: Ubuntu 16.04
Compiler: GCC 6.3.0
C-Blosc2: 2.0.0a4.dev (2017-07-14)
BloscLZ: 1.0.6 (2017-07-14)