Double prefetch on Windows

After fixing the cpu frequency with RightMark tool I was
able to test speed all the different prefetch combinations.

Here the results:

OS Windows Vista 32bit, MSVC compile
CPU Intecl Core 2 Duo T5220 1.55 GHz
bench on depth 12, 1 thread, 26552844 nodes searched
results in nodes/sec

no-prefetch
402486, 402005, 402767, 401439, 403060

single prefetch (aligned 64)
410145, 409159, 408078, 410443, 409652

double prefetch (aligned 64) 0+32
414739, 411238, 413937, 414641, 413834

double prefetch (aligned 64) 0+64
413537, 414337, 413537, 414842, 414240

And now also some crazy stuff:

single prefetch (aligned 128)
410145, 407395, 406230, 410050, 409949

double prefetch (aligned 64) 0+0
409753, 410044, 409456

single prefetch (aligned 64) +32
408379, 408272, 406809

single prefetch (aligned 64) +64
408279, 409059, 407395

So it seems the best is a double prefetch at the addres + 32 or +64,
I will choose the second one because it seems more natural to me.

It is still a mystery why it doesn't work under Linux :-(

Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>

diff --git a/src/tt.cpp b/src/tt.cpp
index 0396b287cc5734b9517569e1124f91ddf0fcde73..ffb8b0124568e58101a913af300b60bf2dc195ce 100644 (file)
--- a/src/tt.cpp
+++ b/src/tt.cpp
@@ -174,12 +174,14 @@ TTEntry* TranspositionTable::retrieve(const Key posKey) const {
 /// blocking function and do not stalls the CPU waiting for data
 /// to be loaded from RAM, that can be very slow. When we will
 /// subsequently call retrieve() the TT data will be already
-/// quickly accessible in L1/l2 CPU cache.
+/// quickly accessible in L1/L2 CPU cache.
 
 void TranspositionTable::prefetch(const Key posKey) const {
 
 #if defined(_MSC_VER)
-  _mm_prefetch((char*)first_entry(posKey), _MM_HINT_T0);
+   char* addr = (char*)first_entry(posKey);
+  _mm_prefetch(addr, _MM_HINT_T0);
+  _mm_prefetch(addr+64, _MM_HINT_T0);
 #else
   // We need to force an asm volatile here because gcc builtin
   // is optimized away by Intel compiler.