An FFT Performance Model for Optimizing General-Purpose Processor Architecture

• Published in: Journal of computer science and technology Vol. 26; no. 5; pp. 875 - 889
• Main Author: 李玲 陈云霁 刘道福 钱诚 胡伟武
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston Springer US 01.09.2011; Springer Nature B.V; Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China Loongson Technologies Corporation Limited, Beijing 100190, China
• Subjects: Accuracy; Algorithms; Artificial Intelligence; Bandwidths; Central processing units; Computer architecture; Computer Science; CPUs; Data Structures and Information Theory; Fast Fourier transformations; FFT分析; Fourier transforms; GPPS; Information Systems Applications (incl.Internet); Lower bounds; Microprocessors; Optimization; Optimization techniques; Power consumption; Science; Software Engineering; Studies; Theory of Computation; 优化技术; 应用程序; 快速傅立叶变换; 性能模型; 架构; 通用处理器; performance prediction model; vector unit; DMA; general-purpose processor (GPP); fast Fourier transform (FFT)
• ISSN: 1000-9000; 1860-4749
• DOI: 10.1007/s11390-011-0186-z

General-purpose processor （GPP） is an important platform for fast Fourier transform （FFT）,due to its flexibility,reliability and practicality.FFT is a representative application intensive in both computation and memory access,optimizing the FFT performance of a GPP also benefits the performances of many other applications.To facilitate the analysis of FFT,this paper proposes a theoretical model of the FFT processing.The model gives out a tight lower bound of the runtime of FFT on a GPP,and guides the architecture optimization for GPP as well.Based on the model,two theorems on optimization of architecture parameters are deduced,which refer to the lower bounds of register number and memory bandwidth.Experimental results on different processor architectures （including Intel Core i7 and Godson-3B） validate the performance model.The above investigations were adopted in the development of Godson-3B,which is an industrial GPP.The optimization techniques deduced from our performance model improve the FFT performance by about 40%,while incurring only 0.8% additional area cost.Consequently,Godson-3B solves the 1024-point single-precision complex FFT in 0.368 μs with about 40 Watt power consumption,and has the highest performance-per-watt in complex FFT among processors as far as we know.This work could benefit optimization of other GPPs as well.