The cost of clearing memory

The technical report "The Renewed Case for the Reduced Instruction Set Computer: Avoiding ISA Bloat with Macro-Op Fusion for RISC-V" looks at how the RISC-V ISA compares to ARM and Intel by analyzing the result from running SPEC CINT2006. One thing that surprised me was that 30% of the instructions executed when running the 403.gcc benchmark (which compiles a few files using a modified GCC 3.2) is from doing memset!

The RISC-V memset loop writes 16 bytes in 4 instructions

// RV64G, 4 instructions to move 16 bytes
4a3814:   sd    a1, 0(a4)
4a3818:   sd    a1, 8(a4)
4a381c:   addi  a4, a4, 16
4a3820:   bltu  a4, a3, 4a3814

which is somewhat less efficient compared to ARM and Intel that writes more data per instruction

// armv8, 6 instructions to move 64 bytes
6f0928:   stp   x7, x7, [x8,#16]
6f092c:   stp   x7, x7, [x8,#32]
6f0930:   stp   x7, x7, [x8,#48]
6f0934:   stp   x7, x7, [x8,#64]!
6f0938:   subs  x2, x2, #0x40
6f093c:   b.ge  6f0928

so this should translate to about 10% of the executed ARM instructions doing memset. But that is still much more than what I would have guessed.

I do not have access to SPEC, and I have been too lazy to try to replicate with other data, but a quick literature search indicates that this is not as insane as I thought. The papers I have found look at the cost of clearing data in garbage collection implementations, and they seem to get a similar result for the cost. For example "Why Nothing Matters: The Impact of Zeroing" says

We show that existing approaches of zero initialization are surprisingly expensive. On three modern IA32 architectures, the direct cost is around 2.7-4.5% on average and as much as 12.7% of all cycles, in a high-performance Java Virtual Machine (JVM), without accounting for indirect costs due to cache displacement and memory bandwidth consumption.