Characteristics of loop unrolling effect: software pipelining and memory latency hiding

Recently loop unrolling has been shown in a new light from the superscalar architectural point of view. In this paper, we show that in addition to superscalar effect and scalar replacement effect, loop unrolling can hide memory latency, and that the combination of those effects improve the performance of loop unrolling. A major contribution of this paper is that the analysis is done symbolically and quantitatively. Although they have been known as major reasons that affect the performance of loop unrolling, no quantitative approach has not been tried. Our analysis can make clear the behaviour of superscalar functions and memory latency hiding in loop unrolling.