#3557: CPU Vector instructions in GHC.Prim
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Reporter: guest | Owner: vivian
Type: feature request | Status: new
Priority: normal | Milestone: _|_
Component: Compiler (NCG) | Version: 6.11
Keywords: | Testcase:
Blockedby: | Difficulty: Unknown
Os: Unknown/Multiple | Blocking:
Architecture: Unknown/Multiple | Failure: None/Unknown
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Comment(by vivian):
Replying to [comment:26 guest]:
> Replying to [comment:25 rl]:
> > FWIW, I don't think those reasons are entirely correct. I would
suggest moving the page back. Vector instructions ''are'' SIMD
instuctions. Vector computing is, to me, something fairly different. The
relevant Wikipedia pages have a lot of information which might help clear
up the confusion.
>
> I do not know what Wikipedia pages are relevant for you, but I think
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_processor
> supports the view, that SSE and AltiVec are about vector computing (or
vector processing) not about parallel/SIMD computing. The same applies to
the Blog article that compares Larrabee with NVidia GPUs.
> I do not see a reason to throw together two different approaches. Do we
disagree on the naming or on the statement, that there are two different
approaches to tackle repetitive computations?
There are three terms here: (i) parallel, (ii) SIMD, (iii) vector
processing.
You seem to be equating SIMD with parallel as opposed to vector
processing. This, I think, is an error. Consider a Beowulf cluster,
which is a parallel machine that uses MPI. This cluster can execute
parallel algorithms where each node has its own instructions and data
'''Multiple Instruction Multiple Data (MIMD)'''.
A different sort of parallelism occurs when the same instruction is
performed on different data units at the same time '''Single Instruction
Multiple Data (SIMD)'''. In this sense SIMD '''is''' vector processing
and SIMD is the standard name for it.
By the way, SSE stands for 'Streaming SIMD Extension'.
Whether the computations are performed on the CPU or a GPU, if the same
instruction (or kernel) is applied to multiple data units in parallel,
this is SIMD.
Also, Manuel Chakravarty has written the
[http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/Accelerate Accelerate] package for
using the NVidia GPU from Haskell.
Anyway, this feature request is about adding CPU Vector instructions,
i.e., SSE, or '''Streaming SIMD Extension'''s.
--
Ticket URL: <http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/3557#comment:27>
GHC <http://www.haskell.org/ghc/>
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