An FFT Performance Model for Optimizing General-Purpose Processor Architecture

General-purpose processor (GPP) is an important platform for fast Fourier transform (FFT), due to its flexibility, reliability and practicality. FFT is a representative application intensive in both computation and memory access, optimizing the FFT performance of a GPP also benefits the performances of many other applications. To facilitate the analysis of FFT, this paper proposes a theoretical model of the FFT processing. The model gives out a tight lower bound of the runtime of FFT on a GPP, and guides the architecture optimization for GPP as well. Based on the model, two theorems on optimization of architecture parameters are deduced, which refer to the lower bounds of register number and memory bandwidth. Experimental results on different processor architectures (including Intel Core i7 and Godson-3B) validate the performance model. The above investigations were adopted in the development of Godson-3B, which is an industrial GPP. The optimization techniques deduced from our performance model improve the FFT performance by about 40%, while incurring only 0.8% additional area cost. Consequently, Godson-3B solves the 1024-point single-precision complex FFT in 0.368 is with about 40 Watt power consumption, and has the highest performance-per-watt in complex FFT among processors as far as we know. This work could benefit optimization of other GPPs as well.