Re: [boost] Going forward with Boost.SIMD

Subject: Re: [boost] Going forward with Boost.SIMD
From: Marc Glisse (marc.glisse_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-04-18 19:21:58

On Thu, 18 Apr 2013, Andrey Semashev wrote:

> 1. When a particular algorithm or pack configuration is not supported by
> the hardware, is the implementation required to emulate it with scalar or
> partially vectorized operations?

Yes (according to my recollection of reading the paper).

> 3. It supports division and modulus for integers?

Why not?

> Is it supported by any hardware?

At least some special cases are, like division by a power of 2. And if the 
divisor is constant, you can also let the implementation handle turning it 
into a multiplication. And the general case might very well be supported 
in the future, if it isn't already.

> 4. How would advanced operations be implemented, such as FMA and integer
> madd? Is it through additional library provided functions? IMHO, the
> availability of these operations is often crucial for performance of the
> user's algorithm, if it is more complicated than just accumulating integers.

If you only want fma as a fast way to compute a+b*c, you could just let 
your compiler optimize an addition and a multiplication to fma. They are 
not bad at that. If you rely on the extra accuracy of fma, then library 
functions seem necessary.

-- 
Marc Glisse