InstructionOverhead

Description

The pattern "Instruction Overhead" describes the fact that for a piece of high-level code, the compiler outputs a lot of instructions although is could be done in less. One common example are non-vectorized instructions.

Symptoms

Instruction Overhead causes a low application performance and a good scaling behavior across cores. The performance is insensitive to the problem size.

Detection

• Low CPI value (near to theoretical limit)
• Large non-FP instruction count (constant vs. number of cores)

Possible optimizations and/or fixes

It depends on the kind of instructions. If the code is using scalar FP instructions, activate vectorization to reduce the number of instructions.