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Apple's M4 has reportedly adopted the ARMv9 architecture

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Re: Apple's M4 has reportedly adopted the ARMv9 architecture

#201
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the measurable benefit to implementing 128b SVE2? Like, ARM has CPUs that implement that, and it's not even disabled on some chips. So there must be benchmarks somewhere showing how worthwhile it is. And implementing 256b SVE has different issues depending on how you do it. 4x256b vector ALUs are more power hungry than generally useful. 2x256b is only beneficial over 4x128b if you're limited by decode width,…

I'd say that the theoretical ability to gang units together would be appealing. If you have four 128-bit packed SIMD, you must execute 4 different instructions at once or the others go to waste. With SVE, you could (in theory) use all 4 as a single, very wide vector for common operations if there weren't a lot of instructions competing for execution ports. You could even dynamically allocate them based on expected ve…

You can't do 2048 bits of addition in one SVE instruction; not portably, at least (and definitely not on any existing hardware). While the maximum SVE register size is 2048 bits, the minimum is 128 bits, and the hardware chooses the supported register size, not the programmer. For portable SVE, your code needs to work for all of those widths, not just the smallest or largest. (of related note is RISC-V RVV, which allows you to group up to 8 registers together, allowing a minimum portable operation width of 128×8 = 1024 bits in a single instruction (and up to 65536×8 = 64KB for hypothetical crazy hardware with max VLEN), but SVE/SVE2 don't have any equivalent)

Re: Apple's M4 has reportedly adopted the ARMv9 architecture

#203
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the measurable benefit to implementing 128b SVE2? Like, ARM has CPUs that implement that, and it's not even disabled on some chips. So there must be benchmarks somewhere showing how worthwhile it is. And implementing 256b SVE has different issues depending on how you do it. 4x256b vector ALUs are more power hungry than generally useful. 2x256b is only beneficial over 4x128b if you're limited by decode width,…

I'd say that the theoretical ability to gang units together would be appealing. If you have four 128-bit packed SIMD, you must execute 4 different instructions at once or the others go to waste. With SVE, you could (in theory) use all 4 as a single, very wide vector for common operations if there weren't a lot of instructions competing for execution ports. You could even dynamically allocate them based on expected ve…

A for() loop does the same thing at the cost of like 3 instructions. 4x128b has the flexibility that you don't need 512b wide operations on the same data to keep the ALUs fed. If you have 512b wide operations being split to 4x128b instructions, great, otherwise the massive OoOE window of modern chips can decode the next few loop iterations to keep the ALUs fed, or even pull instructions from a completely different kernel.

Re: Apple's M4 has reportedly adopted the ARMv9 architecture

#204
post #2

Hmm, I was thinking of buying an M3 Pro 16” this summer, but maybe I should wait then

I just bought a refurbished 16in M3 pro, no regrets at all. There's always a new one around the corner, it's really just about whether your setup achieves what you need it to.

Look at real world differences between M2 and M3, it's not a massive jump at all.

I do cross platform app development and the machine is excellent for that. Glad to have it now rather than waiting months for a slightly better system

Re: Apple's M4 has reportedly adopted the ARMv9 architecture

#205
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's somewhat unfair to ask for real world examples when there really aren't many people writing optimized SVE code right now. Probably because there are hardly any devices with the extension. I think the transition from AVX2 to AVX512 is comparable in that it provided not only larger vectors, but also a much nicer ISA. There were certainly a few projects that benefited significantly from that move. simdjson…

CPUs with SVE have been generally available for two years now. SME and AVX-512 got benchmarks written showing them off before the CPUs were even available. Seems fair to me. simdjson specifically benefitted from Intel's hardware decision to implement a 512b permute from 2x 512b registers with a throughput of 1/cycle. That's area-expensive, which is (probably) why ARM has historically skimped on tbl performance, only…

It’s been a while since I looked, but I remember SVE2 being much more usable than SVE. A64FX was SVE IIRC. I think SVE did not do a great job of fully replacing NEON.

Re: Apple's M4 has reportedly adopted the ARMv9 architecture

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Anymore)

I don't think it ever was?

I do also believe it wasn't ever technically "statically linked", but the dynamic libraries were separately distributed as part of every app (and so I'd think the semantic slippage acceptable given the context). This has tons of advantages, but prevented Swift from being used in Apple libraries.

Re: Apple's M4 has reportedly adopted the ARMv9 architecture

#209

I do find it amusing that journalists never go beyond Twitter for discussion on this because this was all being confirmed on Mastodon days before any of the posts in the article

Thing is, normal people don’t really like interacting with the kind of person that would have jumped over to Mastodon. Zeal is insufferable most of the time.

Re: Apple's M4 has reportedly adopted the ARMv9 architecture

#210

I do find it amusing that journalists never go beyond Twitter for discussion on this because this was all being confirmed on Mastodon days before any of the posts in the article

Thing is, normal people don’t really like interacting with the kind of person that would have jumped over to Mastodon. Zeal is insufferable most of the time.

Well, unfortunately, the kind of person who is an expert on SME is on Mastodon. So if you're writing an article on it, you should probably go to them instead of tech influencers who recycle content on Twitter.
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