Supercompilers, the AMD Opteron, and your cell phone

Summary form only given. As The Portland Group Compiler Technology and the Advanced Compilers Tools group within STMicroelectronics, we deliver compilers for both the high performance technical computing market, such as Summary form only given. AMD Opteron servers, and embedded DSP microcores, in particular, the ST100 from STMicroelectronics. This article explores the similarities and differences between compiler optimization strategies for these two markets. We demonstrate that many of the optimizations developed for high performance systems apply in the embedded market. For instance, compilers for both markets use vectorization for multimedia-type operations, loop unrolling, and interprocedural analysis. Software pipelining, first developed for the technical computing market, is now used for the ST100. There are also important differences; multiprocessing is quite mature in the technical computing industry, but is only beginning to be explored in the embedded market. On the other hand, optimizing for performance is not the only goal in the embedded industry; the total memory usage is also quite important. This article shows case-by-case performance improvements on the AMD Opteron and ST122 DSP for a selected set of common optimizations.