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arm64 SME2 (Apple M4): SGEMM/DGEMM well below the hardware, level-3 routines on NEON, M4 Pro not detected #6073

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@tesch1

On Apple M4 (SME2, 512-bit streaming vector length), develop (63d7f22) leaves most of the SME unit unused:

  • SGEMM/DGEMM: sme_[sd]gemm_kernel ([WIP] Add ARMv9.2 SME GEMM kernels ported from vlovero's project #5971) runs at about 0.6x of Accelerate on one thread, and on one
    thread whatever the thread count, while the M4 Pro has two SME units (one per performance cluster).
    fp32 geometric means over the 24 workloads of Deng et al. (arXiv:2512.21473), row-major / column-major, GFLOPS:

    Accelerate develop
    SGEMM, 1 thread 1127 / 1185 707 / 766
    SGEMM, default threads 2364 / 2445 702 / 766
    DGEMM, 1 thread 321 / 344 275 / 283
  • SYMM, SYRK, SYR2K, TRMM, TRSM run through the level-3 driver on NEON kernels: about 100-115 GFLOPS in fp32
    and 53-58 in fp64 at n = 1024 on one thread, against 791-1758 and 265-433 for Accelerate. The SME kernel cannot
    simply be plugged into the driver, because SYMM/TRMM share the GEMM unroll sizes (where [WIP] Arm®v9-A architecture SME2 SGEMM kernels #5011 stopped).

  • Detection: the M4 Pro (hw.cpufamily 0x17d5b93a) is not recognised by getarch, so a build without
    TARGET falls back to ARMV8 without any SME code.

Measured on an M4 Pro, macOS 27, Apple clang 21; harness and raw data in https://github.com/tesch1/mtgemm-a.

Prepared with AI coding assistance.

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