Loop Interchange and Subscripts: Matrix Multiply

Matrix multiplication is commonly written as shown in the example below:

Typical Matrix Multiplication

for(i=0; i<N; i++)

{

    for(j=0; j<n; j++)

    {

        for(k=0; k<n; k++)

        {

            c[i][j]=c[i][j]+a[i][k]*b[k][j];

        }

    }

}

The use of b[k][j], is not a stride-1 reference and therefore will not normally be vectorizable. If the loops are interchanged, however, all the references will become stride-1 as shown in the "Matrix Multiplication With Stride-1" example.

Caution

Interchanging is not always possible because of dependencies, which can lead to different results.

Matrix Multiplication With Stride-1

for(i = 0; i<N; i++)

{

    for(k=0; k<n; k++)

    {

        for(j=0; j<n; j++)

        {

            c[i][j]=c[i][j]+a[i][k]*b[k][j];

        }

    }

}