A quick trick for faster naïve matrix multiplication

If you need to multiply some matrices together very quickly, usually it's best to use a highly optimized library like ATLAS. But sometimes adding such a dependency isn't worth it, if you're worried about portability, code size, etc. If you just need good performance, rather than the best possible performance, it can make sense to hand-roll your own matrix multiplication function.

Unfortunately, the way that matrix multiplication is usually taught:

$$C_{i,j} = \sum_k A_{i,k} \, B_{k,j}$$

$\Bigg($$\Bigg) = \Bigg($$\Bigg) \, \Bigg($$\Bigg)$

leads to a slow implementation:

void matmul(double *dest, const double *lhs, const double *rhs,
            size_t rows, size_t mid, size_t cols) {
    for (size_t i = 0; i < rows; ++i) {
        for (size_t j = 0; j < cols; ++j) {
            const double *rhs_row = rhs;
            double sum = 0.0;
            for (size_t k = 0; k < mid; ++k) {
                sum += lhs[k] * rhs_row[j];
                rhs_row += cols;
            }
            *dest++ = sum;
        }
        lhs += mid;
    }
}

This function multiplies a rows×mid matrix with a mid×cols matrix using the "linear algebra 101" algorithm. Unfortunately, it has a bad memory access pattern: we loop over dest and lhs pretty much in order, but jump all over the place in rhs, since it's stored row-major but we need its columns.

Luckily there's a simple fix that's dramatically faster: instead of computing each cell of the destination separately, we can update whole rows of it at a time. Effectively, we do this:

$$C_{i} = \sum_j A_{i,j} \, B_j$$

$\Bigg($$\Bigg) = \Bigg($$\Bigg) \, \Bigg($$\Bigg)$

In code, it looks like this:

void matmul(double *dest, const double *lhs, const double *rhs,
            size_t rows, size_t mid, size_t cols) {
    memset(dest, 0, rows * cols * sizeof(double));

    for (size_t i = 0; i < rows; ++i) {
        const double *rhs_row = rhs;
        for (size_t j = 0; j < mid; ++j) {
            for (size_t k = 0; k < cols; ++k) {
                dest[k] += lhs[j] * rhs_row[k];
            }
            rhs_row += cols;
        }
        dest += cols;
        lhs += mid;
    }
}

On my computer, that drops the time to multiply two 256×256 matrices from 37ms to 13ms (with gcc -O3). ATLAS does it in 5ms though, so always use something like it if it's available.