Floating-Point precision toggle

When we set the floating-point precision at every single floating-point instruction explicitly, a significant number of memory operations gets added to the instruction stream that stalls the processor pipeline and thus degrades performance. By using a simple heuristic for determining whether a method uses single or double precision predominantly (as described in section 3), we are able to increase performance by a factor of up to 1.8 as shown in Figure 12.

Figure: Benchmark performance when enabling optimization for toggling floating-point precision. The performance number represents the ratio between the measured runtime with floating-point mode optimization enabled and the measured runtime with floating-point mode optimization disabled.

In SpecJVM, only mpegaudio and mtrt use floating point operations frequently. However, in mpegaudio the compiler generates more register to register floating point operations that require the precision mode to be switched.