Compiler-Based Data Prefetching and Streaming Non-temporal Store Generation for the Intel(R) Xeon Phi(TM) Coprocessor

Abstract

The Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor has software prefetching instructions to hide memory latencies and special store instructions to save bandwidth on streaming non-temporal store operations. In this work, we provide details on compiler-based generation of these instructions and evaluate their impact on the performance of the Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor using a wide range of parallel applications with different characteristics. Our results show that the Intel® Composer XE 2013 compiler can make effective use of these mechanisms to achieve significant performance improvements.