Thanks for the input, Gabe.  I'm not surprised that SSE is designed
specifically to enable a dual-pumped 64-bit implementation; whether to do
it that way or to spend more resources on a single-cycle 128-bit
implementation is just a design trade-off that might be made differently
for different products, while maintaining binary compatibility.

I'd be surprised if that's not still true of AVX and AVX-512, that they're
designed to be implemented either with full-width or half-width (or perhaps
even narrower) pipelines.  If we ever decided to make that configurable in
gem5 it would be a pain, as it may well require having separate microcode
implementations.  I doubt that's an issue we'll have to face anytime soon
though.

Steve


On Thu, Feb 4, 2016 at 3:54 PM Gabe Black <[email protected]> wrote:

> Independent of your CLs, I saw when implementing the SSE stuff that it's
> definitely designed so that it can be done in two, independent 64 bit
> halves, probably by two 64 bit FPUs. The only exception I remember were 128
> bit shift instructions which would shift bits between the two halves.
> That's why I implemented things by generally just doing everything twice,
> once for each half of the registers. I'm not that familiar with the more
> recent 256 bit instructions so that may have changed. I can see why
> accessing the full 128 bits atomically would be helpful, though.
>
> Gabe
>
> On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 2:27 PM, Steve Reinhardt <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > I posted most of these x86 patches two weeks ago.  If I don't hear
> > something by Friday (2/5), I'll assume that no one wants to review them,
> > and will commit them sometime after that.
> >
> > http://reviews.gem5.org/r/3290/
> > http://reviews.gem5.org/r/3291/
> > http://reviews.gem5.org/r/3307/
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Steve
> > _______________________________________________
> > gem5-dev mailing list
> > [email protected]
> > http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/gem5-dev
> >
> _______________________________________________
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