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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
1

RISC-V Compiler Performance:A Comparison between GCC and LLVM/clang

Bjäreholt, Johan January 2017 (has links)
RISC-V is a new open-source instruction set architecture (ISA) that in De-cember 2016 manufactured its rst mass-produced processors. It focuses onboth eciency and performance and diers from other open-source architec-tures by not having a copyleft license permitting vendors to freely design,manufacture and sell RISC-V chips without any fees nor having to sharetheir modications on the reference implementations of the architecture.The goal of this thesis is to evaluate the performance of the GCC andLLVM/clang compilers support for the RISC-V target and their ability tooptimize for the architecture. The performance will be evaluated from ex-ecuting the CoreMark and Dhrystone benchmarks are both popular indus-try standard programs for evaluating performance on embedded processors.They will be run on both the GCC and LLVM/clang compilers on dierentoptimization levels and compared in performance per clock to the ARM archi-tecture which is mature yet rather similar to RISC-V. The compiler supportfor the RISC-V target is still in development and the focus of this thesis willbe the current performance dierences between the GCC and LLVM com-pilers on this architecture. The platform we will execute the benchmarks onwil be the Freedom E310 processor on the SiFive HiFive1 board for RISC-Vand a ARM Cortex-M4 processor by Freescale on the Teensy 3.6 board. TheFreedom E310 is almost identical to the reference Berkeley Rocket RISC-Vdesign and the ARM Coretex-M4 processor has a similar clock speed and isaimed at a similar target audience.The results presented that the -O2 and -O3 optimization levels on GCCfor RISC-V performed very well in comparison to our ARM reference. Onthe lower -O1 optimization level and -O0 which is no optimizations and -Oswhich is -O0 with optimizations for generating a smaller executable code sizeGCC performs much worse than ARM at 46% of the performance at -O1,8.2% at -Os and 9.3% at -O0 on the CoreMark benchmark with similar resultsin Dhrystone except on -O1 where it performed as well as ARM. When turn-ing o optimizations (-O0) GCC for RISC-V was 9.2% of the performanceon ARM in CoreMark and 11% in Dhrystone which was unexpected andneeds further investigation. LLVM/clang on the other hand crashed whentrying to compile our CoreMark benchmark and on Dhrystone the optimiza-tion options made a very minor impact on performance making it 6.0% theperformance of GCC on -O3 and 5.6% of the performance of ARM on -O3, soeven with optimizations it was still slower than GCC without optimizations.In conclusion the performance of RISC-V with the GCC compiler onthe higher optimization levels performs very well considering how young theRISC-V architecture is. It does seems like there could be room for improvement on the lower optimization levels however which in turn could also pos-sibly increase the performance of the higher optimization levels. With theLLVM/clang compiler on the other hand a lot of work needs to be done tomake it competetive in both performance and stability with the GCC com-piler and other architectures. Why the -O0 optimization is so considerablyslower on RISC-V than on ARM was also very unexpected and needs furtherinvestigation.

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