Why is memcmp so much faster than a for loop check?

Question

Why is memcmp(a, b, size) so much faster than:

for(i = 0; i < nelements; i++) {
    if a[i] != b[i] return 0;
}
return 1;

Is memcmp a CPU instruction or something? It must be pretty deep because I got a massive speedup using memcmp over the loop.

Answer 1

memcmp is often implemented in assembly to take advantage of a number of architecture-specific features, which can make it much faster than a simple loop in C.

As a "builtin"

GCC supports memcmp (as well as a ton of other functions) as builtins. In some versions / configurations of GCC, a call to memcmp will be recognized as __builtin_memcmp. Instead of emitting a call to the memcmp library function, GCC will emit a handful of instructions to act as an optimized inline version of the function.

On x86, this leverages the use of the cmpsb instruction, which compares a string of bytes at one memory location to another. This is coupled with the repe prefix, so the strings are compared until they are no longer equal, or a count is exhausted. (Exactly what memcmp does).

Given the following code:

int test(const void* s1, const void* s2, int count)
{
    return memcmp(s1, s2, count) == 0;
}

gcc version 3.4.4 on Cygwin generates the following assembly:

; (prologue)
mov     esi, [ebp+arg_0]    ; Move first pointer to esi
mov     edi, [ebp+arg_4]    ; Move second pointer to edi
mov     ecx, [ebp+arg_8]    ; Move length to ecx

cld                         ; Clear DF, the direction flag, so comparisons happen
                            ; at increasing addresses
cmp     ecx, ecx            ; Special case: If length parameter to memcmp is
                            ; zero, don't compare any bytes.
repe cmpsb                  ; Compare bytes at DS:ESI and ES:EDI, setting flags
                            ; Repeat this while equal ZF is set
setz    al                  ; Set al (return value) to 1 if ZF is still set
                            ; (all bytes were equal).
; (epilogue) 

Reference:

• cmpsb instruction

As a library function

Highly-optimized versions of memcmp exist in many C standard libraries. These will usually take advantage of architecture-specific instructions to work with lots of data in parallel.

In Glibc, there are versions of memcmp for x86_64 that can take advantage of the following instruction set extensions:

• SSE2 - sysdeps/x86_64/memcmp.S
• SSE4 - sysdeps/x86_64/multiarch/memcmp-sse4.S
• SSSE3 - sysdeps/x86_64/multiarch/memcmp-ssse3.S

The cool part is that glibc will detect (at run-time) the newest instruction set your CPU has, and execute the version optimized for it. See this snippet from sysdeps/x86_64/multiarch/memcmp.S:

ENTRY(memcmp)
    .type   memcmp, @gnu_indirect_function
    LOAD_RTLD_GLOBAL_RO_RDX
    HAS_CPU_FEATURE (SSSE3)
    jnz 2f
    leaq    __memcmp_sse2(%rip), %rax
    ret 

2:  HAS_CPU_FEATURE (SSE4_1)
    jz  3f  
    leaq    __memcmp_sse4_1(%rip), %rax
    ret 

3:  leaq    __memcmp_ssse3(%rip), %rax
    ret 

END(memcmp)

In the Linux kernel

Linux does not seem to have an optimized version of memcmp for x86_64, but it does for memcpy, in arch/x86/lib/memcpy_64.S. Note that is uses the alternatives infrastructure (arch/x86/kernel/alternative.c) for not only deciding at runtime which version to use, but actually patching itself to only make this decision once at boot-up.