Introducing the Arm-membench Throughput Benchmark

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Burth, Cyrill, Velten, Markus, Schöne, Robert
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Burth, Cyrill
Velten, Markus
Schöne, Robert
author_facet Burth, Cyrill
Velten, Markus
Schöne, Robert
contents Application performance of modern day processors is often limited by the memory subsystem rather than actual compute capabilities. Therefore, data throughput specifications play a key role in modeling application performance and determining possible bottlenecks. However, while peak instruction throughputs and bandwidths for local caches are often documented, the achievable throughput can also depend on the relation between memory access and compute instructions. In this paper, we present an Arm version of the well established x86-membench throughput benchmark, which we have adapted to support all current SIMD extensions of the Armv8 instruction set architecture. We describe aspects of the Armv8 ISA that need to be considered in the portable design of this benchmark. We use the benchmark to analyze the memory subsystem at a fine spatial granularity and to unveil microarchitectural details of three processors: Fujitsu A64FX, Ampere Altra and Cavium ThunderX2. Based on the resulting performance information, we show that instruction fetch and decoder widths become a potential bottleneck for cache-bandwidth-sensitive workloads due to the load-store concept of the Arm ISA.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_06813
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Introducing the Arm-membench Throughput Benchmark
Burth, Cyrill
Velten, Markus
Schöne, Robert
Hardware Architecture
Performance
Application performance of modern day processors is often limited by the memory subsystem rather than actual compute capabilities. Therefore, data throughput specifications play a key role in modeling application performance and determining possible bottlenecks. However, while peak instruction throughputs and bandwidths for local caches are often documented, the achievable throughput can also depend on the relation between memory access and compute instructions. In this paper, we present an Arm version of the well established x86-membench throughput benchmark, which we have adapted to support all current SIMD extensions of the Armv8 instruction set architecture. We describe aspects of the Armv8 ISA that need to be considered in the portable design of this benchmark. We use the benchmark to analyze the memory subsystem at a fine spatial granularity and to unveil microarchitectural details of three processors: Fujitsu A64FX, Ampere Altra and Cavium ThunderX2. Based on the resulting performance information, we show that instruction fetch and decoder widths become a potential bottleneck for cache-bandwidth-sensitive workloads due to the load-store concept of the Arm ISA.
title Introducing the Arm-membench Throughput Benchmark
topic Hardware Architecture
Performance
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.06813