getOperationCost() is not the cost we wanted; that's not the
throughput value that the rest of the calculation uses.
We may want to switch everything in this code to use the
getInstructionThroughput() wrapper to avoid these kinds of
problems, but I'll look at that as a follow-up because that
can create other logical diffs via using optional parameters
(we'd need to speculatively create the vector instruction to
make a fair(er) comparison).
We have several bug reports that could be characterized as "reducing scalarization",
and this topic was also raised on llvm-dev recently:
http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2020-January/138157.html
...so I'm proposing that we deal with these patterns in a new, lightweight IR vector
pass that runs before/after other vectorization passes.
There are 4 alternate options that I can think of to deal with this kind of problem
(and we've seen various attempts at all of these), but they all have flaws:
InstCombine - can't happen without TTI, but we don't want target-specific
folds there.
SDAG - too late to assist other vectorization passes; TLI is not equipped
for these kind of cost queries; limited to a single basic block.
CGP - too late to assist other vectorization passes; would need to re-implement
basic cleanups like CSE/instcombine.
SLP - doesn't fit with existing transforms; limited to a single basic block.
This initial patch/transform is based on existing code in AggressiveInstCombine:
we walk backwards through the function looking for a pattern match. But we diverge
from that cost-independent IR canonicalization pass by using TTI to decide if the
vector alternative is profitable.
We probably have at least 10 similar bug reports/patterns (binops, constants,
inserts, cheap shuffles, etc) that would fit in this pass as follow-up enhancements.
It's possible that we could iterate on a worklist to fix-point like InstCombine does,
but it's safer to start with a most basic case and evolve from there, so I didn't
try to do anything fancy with this initial implementation.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D73480
Sanjay Patel