Re: [eigen] Matrix decompositions

I see that you are now talking about autodiff that mostly involves
coefficient wise operations on usually not too large vectors. So yes
in this case the alignement flag does matter.

As you see, alignement is a rather complex topic and the optimal
memory layout really depends on the use case. So if want more precise
information, please be as specific as possible.

Thanks for the detailed reply Gael.

I has started out wondering about matrix decompositions and then your reply made me think about our autodiff performance issues. You answered all my questions implict and explicit.

Sameer

gael

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 10:47 PM, Sameer Agarwal

<sameeragarwal@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 1:24 PM, Gael Guennebaud <gael.guennebaud@xxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 10:00 PM, Sameer Agarwal
>> <sameeragarwal@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> > So why is SIMD/vectorization disabled on unaligned matrices? and by turn
>> > on
>> > Map objects.
>>
>> SIMD is disabled only for fixed size matrices which are supposed to be
>> small, and so not worth trying to adapt to the actual alignement at
>> run-time. For dynamic size matrices, everything is vectorized.
>
>
> Two questions here.
>
> 1. So I can take an arbitrary block of memory, make a Map object out of it
> and all operations on it are vectorized?
>
> 2. What are the performance implications of using an Aligned versus
> unaligned matrix then? Because in the automatic differentiation code in
> Ceres, where we use unaligned eigen matrices, declaring them aligned makes a
> 2x difference in performance. And we thought this was because vectorization
> was getting disabled.
>
> Sameer
>
>
>
>