Is interesting that this is how array langs work.
I bet will be easy to turn into a lib.
Everyone should know SIMD
41–50 of 263 posts
Re: Everyone should know SIMD
#42My compiler knows SIMD. However, knowing the limitations of SIMD might help avoid a calculation that can't be optimized to use it.
Re: Everyone should know SIMD
#43The biggest barrier I faced learning SIMD is the weird naming convention for intrinsics.
Once I got past that, it was fairly simple. mcyoung's articles were also super helpful
Re: Everyone should know SIMD
#44This is an interesting article. I don't really work with low level enough languages for this to matter (unless - does this ever show up in Javascript somehow?).
I guess I don't understand the "reduce" step. It seems like you have to be careful not to "undo" all the benefit from SIMD. Sure, it can compare 8 values in parallel, but then if you have to look at each of the 8 answers in turn you're back to where you began. Is the `@reduce()` function in the example a special Vector one that tells you if all the values are true or not in one "step"?
Re: Everyone should know SIMD
#45This is an interesting article. I don't really work with low level enough languages for this to matter (unless - does this ever show up in Javascript somehow?). I guess I don't understand the "reduce" step. It seems like you have to be careful not to "undo" all the benefit from SIMD. Sure, it can compare 8 values in parallel, but then if you have to look at each of the 8 answers in turn you're back to where you began…
Yes. "`@reduce(.And, ...)` combines every boolean using `and` and returns a single boolean."
If it's true (the common case here) then you proceed to look at the next 8 bytes.
If it's false, you apply a @bitcast (turn the booleans into bits) and @ctz (find the first 0) to get the index of where it was false.
Re: Everyone should know SIMD
#46Everyone doesn't need to know SIMD. Mechanical sympathy is an important passive perk for software architects to cut down the number of reworks down the line, but I would rate benchmarking and being able to identify bottlenecks as more important everyday skills.
I'm working on a voxel space renderer homebrew for the PlayStation. I only have so many cycles to spend on rendering before it becomes a slideshow, so I count them in my hot rendering loop and parallelize work as much stuff as I can, even across memory load stalls from main RAM.
I've worked on a basic network accessory card with a STM32 MCU that is extremely overkill for what it needs to do. We haven't bothered making any performance or memory optimizations whatsoever, writing plain C++ almost as if we were on server-class hardware because we had such egregious margins.
The first question to ask is not whether something can leverage SIMD, it's whether the performance requirements are met or not (although it's far too easy to not care when it's not your hardware that's struggling...).
Re: Everyone should know SIMD
#47[flagged]
Re: Everyone should know SIMD
#48Everyone should know about SIMD, so you can know when to ask your good friend Al, who knows how to do it, to use it for you in the right places.
Re: Everyone should know SIMD
#49I respect (and fear a little) those who intentionally utilize SIMD in their implementations, but I believe it's a bit too much of a semantic shift for 2-5x performance gain. Good news is that modern compilers are more than capable of emitting SIMD code even if original source is nothing but.
Most software's poor performance would be fixed long before SIMD comes into play. Reduce obvious DB/server round trips, bad data structure/cache locality, poor algorithm complexity, doing redundant computations, etc.
Re: Everyone should know SIMD
#50I respect (and fear a little) those who intentionally utilize SIMD in their implementations, but I believe it's a bit too much of a semantic shift for 2-5x performance gain. Good news is that modern compilers are more than capable of emitting SIMD code even if original source is nothing but. Most software's poor performance would be fixed long before SIMD comes into play. Reduce obvious DB/server round trips, bad dat…
> Reduce obvious DB/server round trips
In my mental model of optimization, the above and SIMD are basically the same thing.