Abstract:
Using new Intel Core i7 instructions to speed up string manipulation.

Created by Peter Kankowski
Last changed
Contributors: Dap and Adam Messinger
Filed under Low-level code optimization

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Implementing strcmp, strlen, and strstr using SSE 4.2 instructions

The new instructions

SSE 4.2 introduces four instructions (PcmpEstrI, PcmpEstrM, PcmpIstrI, and PcmpIstrM) that can be used to speed up text processing code (including strcmp, memcmp, strstr, and strspn functions).

Intel had published the description for new instruction formats, but no sample code nor high-level guidelines. This article tries to provide them.

MovDqU    xmm0, dqword[str1]
PcmpIstrI xmm0, dqword[str2], imm

PcmpIstrI is one of the new string-handling instructions comparing their operands. The first operand is always an SSE register (typically loaded with MovDqU). The second operand can be a memory location. Note the immediate operand, which consists of several bit fields controlling operation modes.

Aggregation operations

The heart of a string-processing instruction is the aggregation operation (immediate bits [3:2]).

Equal each (imm[3:2] = 10). This operation compares two strings (think of strcmp or memcmp). The result of comparison is a bit mask (1 if the corresponding bytes are equal, 0 if not equal). For example:

operand1 = "UseFlatAssembler"
operand2 = "UsingAnAssembler"
IntRes1  =  1100000111111111

Equal any (imm[3:2] = 00). The first operand is a character set, the second is a string (think of strspn or strcspn). The bit mask includes 1 if the character belongs to a set, 0 if not:

operand2 = "You Drive Me Mad", operand1 = "aeiouy"
IntRes1  =  0110001010010010

Ranges (imm[3:2] = 01). The first operand consists of ranges, for example, "azAZ" means "all characters from a to z and all characters from A to Z":

operand2 = "I'm here because", operand1 = "azAZ"
IntRes1  =  1010111101111111

Equal ordered (imm[3:2] = 11). Substring search (strstr). The first operand contains a string to search for, the second is a string to search in. The bit mask includes 1 if the substring is found at the corresponding position:

operand2 = "WhenWeWillBeWed!", operand1 = "We"
IntRes1  =  000010000000100

After computing the aggregation function, IntRes1 can be complemented, expanded into byte mask or shrinked into index. The result is written into xmm0 or ECX registers. Intel manual explains these details well, so there is no need to repeate them here.

Other features of SSE 4.2

  • The strings do not need to be aligned.
  • The processor properly handles end-of-the-string case for zero-terminated strings and Pascal-style strings.
  • You can use the instructions with Unicode characters, signed or unsigned bytes.
  • Four aggregation operations can be used to implement a wide range of string-processing functions.

Implementation

The following strcmp and strlen functions were written and published when the processors with SSE 4.2 support were not available yet. Later they were tested on real hardware and found to be correct.

; compile with FASM
; Immediate byte constants
EQUAL_ANY	    = 0000b
RANGES		    = 0100b
EQUAL_EACH	    = 1000b
EQUAL_ORDERED	    = 1100b
NEGATIVE_POLARITY = 010000b
BYTE_MASK	 = 1000000b

; ==== strcmp ====

strcmp_sse42:
  ; Using __fastcall convention, ecx = string1, edx = string2
  mov eax, ecx
  sub eax, edx ; eax = ecx - edx
  sub edx, 16

STRCMP_LOOP:
    add edx, 16
    MovDqU    xmm0, dqword[edx]
    ; find the first *different* bytes, hence negative polarity
    PcmpIstrI xmm0, dqword[edx + eax], EQUAL_EACH + NEGATIVE_POLARITY
    ja STRCMP_LOOP

  jc STRCMP_DIFF

  ; the strings are equal
  xor eax, eax
  ret
STRCMP_DIFF:
  ; subtract the first different bytes
  add eax, edx
  movzx eax, byte[eax + ecx]
  movzx edx, byte[edx + ecx]
  sub eax, edx
  ret


; ==== strlen ====
strlen_sse42:
  ; ecx = string
  mov eax, -16
  mov edx, ecx
  pxor xmm0, xmm0

STRLEN_LOOP:
    add eax, 16
    PcmpIstrI xmm0, dqword[edx + eax], EQUAL_EACH
    jnz STRLEN_LOOP

  add eax, ecx
  ret

; ==== strstr ====
strstr_sse42:
  ; ecx = haystack, edx = needle

  push esi
  push edi
  MovDqU xmm2, dqword[edx] ; load the first 16 bytes of neddle
  Pxor xmm3, xmm3
  lea eax, [ecx - 16]

  ; find the first possible match of 16-byte fragment in haystack
STRSTR_MAIN_LOOP:
    add eax, 16
    PcmpIstrI xmm2, dqword[eax], EQUAL_ORDERED
    ja STRSTR_MAIN_LOOP

  jnc STRSTR_NOT_FOUND

  add eax, ecx ; save the possible match start
  mov edi, edx
  mov esi, eax
  sub edi, esi
  sub esi, 16

  ; compare the strings
@@:
    add esi, 16
    MovDqU    xmm1, dqword[esi + edi]
    ; mask out invalid bytes in the haystack
    PcmpIstrM xmm3, xmm1, EQUAL_EACH + NEGATIVE_POLARITY + BYTE_MASK
    MovDqU xmm4, dqword[esi]
    PAnd xmm4, xmm0
    PcmpIstrI xmm1, xmm4, EQUAL_EACH + NEGATIVE_POLARITY
    ja @B

  jnc STRSTR_FOUND

  ; continue searching from the next byte
  sub eax, 15
  jmp STRSTR_MAIN_LOOP

STRSTR_NOT_FOUND:
  xor eax, eax

STRSTR_FOUND:
  pop edi
  pop esi
  ret

The first processor with SSE 4.2 support is Intel Core i7, followed by Intel Core i5.

Additional reading

Typo in Intel manual: on figure 5-1, "imm8[6:5]" near Optional boolean negation should be "imm8[5:4]".

Peter Kankowski
Peter Kankowski

About the author

Peter is the developer of Aba Search and Replace, a tool for replacing text in multiple files. He likes to program in C with a bit of C++, also in x86 assembly language, Python, and PHP.

Created by Peter Kankowski
Last changed
Contributors: Dap and Adam Messinger

21 comments

Ten recent comments are shown below. Show all comments

Jeroen van Bemmel,

Note that the inner loop in the above code gets slightly bigger in case GCC chooses e.g. %rbp or %r12 for %4. This can be avoided by explicitly choosing a register, e.g.

"d"(ct) for RDX - at the expense of less freedom in register allocation

Peter Kankowski,

Thank you very much for sharing this! Fitting the loop into 16 bytes is a great idea; you have done a lot of work on the lowest level to achieve this.

You are right that equality is tested more often than the alphabetic order, but the comparison to zero is often missed:

if (strcmp(str, "text"))

instead of

if (strcmp(str, "text") == 0)

In my programs, I use non-standard strcmpeq/memcmpeq functions, which return true if the strings are equal and false if not. It's certainly a matter of taste, and you might prefer the standard behavior (returning zero for equal strings).

Jeroen van Bemmel,

It may be better to implement these functions using intrinsics, that way the compiler is better able to choose the right registers:

  long diff = cs-ct;
  long nextbytes = 16; // asm ("rdx") does not work
  ct -= 16;

// Force GCC to use a register for nextbytes? Makes the code much worse! (adds LEA)
// __asm__ __volatile__( "mov $16, %0" : "=r"(nextbytes) );

loop:
	// could align it ASMVOLATILE( ".align 16\n" : : : "memory" );
	__m128i ct16chars = _mm_loadu_si128( (const __m128i *) (ct += nextbytes) );
	int offset = _mm_cmpistri( ct16chars, * (const __m128i *) (ct+diff), 
                       _SIDD_CMP_EQUAL_EACH | _SIDD_NEGATIVE_POLARITY );
	__asm__ __volatile__ goto( "ja %l[loop] \n jc %l[not_equal]" : : : "memory" : loop, not_equal );
	return 0;

not_equal:
	return ct[diff+offset] - ct[offset];

I did not manage to get gcc to emit instructions which use a register instead of a direct constant - it could be that the compiler believes it performs worse...

(NB am using "asm goto" feature in the above code, it interacts poorly with optimization sometimes because gcc does not know it depends on the flags status)

Jeroen van Bemmel,

Comment on the SSE4.2 strlen() implementation: it actually performs much worse than the following SSE2 implementation (inspired by Agner Fog's implementation):

size_t strlen( const char* s ) {
__m128i zero = _mm_set1_epi8( 0 );
__m128i *s_aligned = (__m128i*) (((long)s) & -0x10L);
u8 misbits = ((long)s) & 0xf;
__m128i s16cs = _mm_load_si128( s_aligned );
__m128i bytemask = _mm_cmpeq_epi8( s16cs, zero );
int bitmask = _mm_movemask_epi8( bytemask );
bitmask = (bitmask>>misbits)<<misbits;

// Alternative: use TEST instead of BSF, then BSF at end (only). Much better on older CPUs
// TEST has latency 1, while BSF has 3!
while (bitmask==0) {
	s16cs = _mm_load_si128( ++s_aligned );
	bytemask = _mm_cmpeq_epi8( s16cs, zero );
	bitmask = _mm_movemask_epi8( bytemask );
}

// bsf only takes 1 clock cycle on modern cpus
return ((( const char* ) s_aligned ) - s) + __builtin_ctz(bitmask);
}

Measurements using Agner Fog's testPMC routines on a Core i7, calling 100000 * strlen() for 4 test strings:

C++ inlined version of the above code:

Processor 0

     Clock    Core cyc   Instruct       Uops  BrMispred 
   6977183    4862520   11500107   12627774         29 
   6558494    4810778   11500010   12600524         22 
   6640618    4852955   11500011   12600727          7 
   6559492    4810098   11500010   12600491          8 
   6566901    4805810   11500010   12600462          9 
   6535459    4796366   11500010   12600415          3 
   6542663    4803975   11500010   12600415          4 
   6555762    4797329   11500011   12600935         13

SSE2 version:

Processor 0

     Clock    Core cyc   Instruct       Uops  BrMispred 
  42095645   33382200    2500115   48931751          1 
  31560226   33403649    2500014   48910384          2 
  30967280   33373350    2500016   48907965          3 
  30473645   33376225    2500015   48907719          2 
  30468486   33378743    2500016   48907860          1 
  30474334   33377705    2500016   48907859          1 
  30473657   33378184    2500015   48907638          1 
  30474393   33376966    2500015   48908046          1

So even though the SSE4 strlen() code above contains far less instructions, these translate into many uops, resulting in more CPU cycles

Jeroen van Bemmel,

Correction: second measurement above is for the SSE4 version of course

Peter Kankowski,

Sorry for the late answer. My results on Core i5:

Short strings (from 1 to 10 characters, from Gettysburg Address)
Microsoft's strlen    990
my_strlen             640
Agner Fog's strlen   1132
SSE2 (your version)   886
SSE4.2                613

A long string ("Jabberwocky")
Microsoft's strlen    919
my_strlen            1156
Agner Fog's strlen   2200
SSE2 (your version)   533
SSE4.2                610

So you version is the winner for long strings. You may be interested to look at a strchr implementation using SSE2. In comparison with it, you carefully avoided the branch for the first misaligned chunk. Nice job!

Sirmabus,

Peter, related but a bit of the topic, have you ever went about optimizing pattern matching with a mask?

Basically the common byte search with wildcards that typically looks like this:

"55 8B EC 6A FF 68 ?? ?? ?? ?? 64 A1 00 00 00 00 50 64 89 25 00 00 00 00 81"

There the "??" represent the variable bytes that you want to skip.

There are many ways of representing this kind of data that could be baked beforehand.

One could have an array of the same size bytes using flags '01' for keep/compare and '00' to skip, or sort of run length encoding, etc.; and of course not dealing with the pattern as a string (no need for that overhead).

I have this idea that one could use SSE instructions with some sort of mask, using bit operation, one might be able to process many pattern bytes at the time.

Any ideas?

Peter Kankowski,

You already described it. Instead of 01 for keep/compare, use 0xFF. So in the mask, you will have 0xFF for each byte you want to compare and 0 for each byte you want to skip. Then run PAND instruction between the loaded bytes and the mask. After PAND, all skipped bytes will turn to zero. In the pattern, you should have zeros for skipped bytes, so that they will be equal.

RHyde,

Just recently came across this thread.

There is one issue with the pcmpistri (and most SSE-based) algorithms- they *always* fetch 16 bytes even if the zero byte is among them. In the (admittedly very) rare case where some of those bytes beyond the zero-terminating byte cross an MMU page boundary, it is possible to get a general protection fault.

Granted, the possibility is quite low. However, you would not want to use such an algorithm for a mission critical application (say, nuclear reactor or life-critical stuff) unless you can guarantee that there are at least 15 bytes of real memory after the zero byte.

Anon,
>>RHyde

Note that as memory is only protected in page sized units, as long as you ensure proper alignment before you start using SSE/AVX instructions you will be safe. But yes, any strcmp/strlen style function that uses SSE/AVX/etc. without a buffer size parameter, must first read in smaller units until it gets to a 16/32 byte aligned address, after which it can start using SSE/AVX safely without having to worry about faulting even if it reads past the end of the string.

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