[llvm-dev] [RFC] Vector Predication

Jacob Lifshay via llvm-dev llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
Mon Feb 4 14:23:42 PST 2019


The architecture Luke and I are working on, assuming it goes the way I
think it will, will have instructions like:
fmadd.s.vvss rd, rs1, rs2, rs3, len=N*VL, pred=rp
where N is from 1 to 4
which has the following pseudo-code:
constexpr auto f32_per_reg = 2;
union FReg
{
    double f64[1];
    float f32[f32_per_reg];
    _Float16 f16[4];
};
union Reg
{
    uint64_t i64[1];
    uint32_t i32[2];
    uint16_t i16[4];
    uint8_t i8[8];
};
// registers
FReg fregs[128];
Reg regs[128];
uint64_t vl;
// instruction fields
int rd, rs1, rs2, rs3, rp, N;
// main code
for(uint64_t i = 0; i < vl * N; i++)
{
    if(regs[rp].i64[0] & (1ULL << i / N))
    {
        auto rv = i / f32_per_reg;
        auto sv = i % f32_per_reg;
        auto rs = (i % N) / f32_per_reg;
        auto ss = (i % N) / f32_per_reg;
        // *+ is contracted into fma
        fregs[rd + rv].f32[sv] = fregs[rs1 + rv].f32[sv] * fregs[rs2 +
rs].f32[ss] + fregs[rs3 + rs].f32[ss];
    }
}

So it would be handy for the vector length on evl intrinsics to be in units
of the mask length so we don't have to pattern match a division in the
backend. We could have 2 variants of the vector length argument, one in
terms of the data vector and one in terms of the mask vector. we could
legalize the mask vector variant for those architectures that need it by
pulling the multiplication out and switching to the data vector variants.

Jacob

On Mon, Feb 4, 2019, 13:41 Robin Kruppe via llvm-dev <
llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, 4 Feb 2019 at 22:04, Simon Moll <moll at cs.uni-saarland.de> wrote:
>
>> On 2/4/19 9:18 PM, Robin Kruppe wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, 4 Feb 2019 at 18:15, David Greene via llvm-dev <
>> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Simon Moll <moll at cs.uni-saarland.de> writes:
>>>
>>> > You are referring to the sub-vector sizes, if i am understanding
>>> > correctly. I'd assume that the mask sub-vector length always has to be
>>> > either 1 or the same as the data sub-vector length. For example, this
>>> > is ok:
>>> >
>>> > %result = call <scalable 3 x float> @llvm.evl.fsub.v4f32(<scalable 3 x
>>> > float> %x, <scalable 3 x float> %y, <scalable 1 x i1> %M, i32 %L)
>>>
>>> What does <scalable 1 x i1> applied to <scalable 3 x float> mean?  I
>>> would expect a requirement of <scalable 3 x i1>.  At least that's how I
>>> understood the SVE proposal [1].  The n's in <scalable n x type> have to
>>> match.
>>>
>>
>> I believe the idea is to allow each single mask bit to control multiple
>> consecutive lanes at once, effectively interpreting the vector being
>> operated on as "many short fixed-length vectors, concatenated" rather than
>> a single long vector of scalars. This is a different interpretation of that
>> type than usual, but it's not crazy, e.g. a similar reinterpretation of
>> vector types seems to be the favored approach for adding matrix operations
>> to LLVM IR. It somewhat obscures the point to discuss this only for
>> scalable vectors, there's no conceptual reason why one couldn't do the same
>> with fixed size vectors.
>>
>> In fact, I would recommend against making almost any new feature or
>> intrinsic exclusive to scalable vectors, including this one: there
>> shouldn't be much extra code required to allow and support it, and not
>> doing so makes the IR less orthogonal. For example, if a <scalable 4 x
>> float> fadd with a <scalable 1 x i1> mask works, then <4 x float> fadd with
>> a <1 x i1> mask, a <8 x float> fadd with a <2 x i1> mask, etc. should also
>> be possible overloads of the same intrinsic.
>>
>> Yep. Doing the same for standard vector IR is on the radar:
>> https://reviews.llvm.org/D57504#1380587.
>>
>>
>> So far, so good. A bit odd, when I think about it, but if hardware out
>> there has that capability, maybe this is a good way to encode it in IR
>> (other options might work too, though). The crux, however, is the
>> interaction with the dynamic vector length: is it in terms of the mask? the
>> longer data vector? if the latter, what happens if it isn't divisible by
>> the mask length? There are multiple options and it's not clear to me which
>> one is "the right one", both for architectures with native support
>> (hopefully the one brough up here won't be the only one) and for internal
>> consistency of the IR. If there was an established architecture with this
>> kind of feature where people have gathered lots of practical experience
>> with it, we could use that inform the decision (just as we have for
>> ordinary predication and dynamic vector length). But I'm not aware of any
>> architecture that does this other than the one Jacob and lkcl are working
>> on, and as far as I know their project still in the early stages.
>>
>> The current understanding is that the dynamic vector length operates in
>> the granularity of the mask: https://reviews.llvm.org/D57504#1381211
>>
> I do understand that this is what Jacob proposes based on the architecture
> he works on. However, it is not yet clear to me whether that is the most
> useful option overall, nor that it is the only option that will lead to
> reasonable codegen for their architecture. But let's leave discussion of
> the details on Phab. I just want to highlight one issue that is not
> specific to Jacob's angle, as it relates to the interpretation of scalable
> vectors more generally:
>
>> In unscaled IR types, this means VL masks each scalar result, in scaled
>> types VL masks sub vectors. E.g. for %L == 1 the following call produces a
>> pair of floats as the result:
>>
>>    <scalable 2 x float> evl.fsub(<scalable 2 x float> %x, <scalable 2 x float> %y, <scalable 2 x i1> %M, i32 %L)
>>
>> As I wrote on Phab mere minutes before you sent this email, I do not
> think this is the right interpretation for any architecture I know about (I
> do not know anything about the things Jacob and Luke are working on) nor
> from the POV of the scalable vector types proposal. A scalable vector is
> not conventionally "a variable-length vector of fixed-size vectors", it it
> simply an ordinary "flat" vector whose length happens to be mostly unknown
> at compile time. If some intrinsics want to interpret it differently, that
> is fine, but that's a property of those specific intrinsics -- similar to
> how proposed matrix intrinsics might interpret a 16 element vector as a 4x4
> matrix.
>
>> I agree that we should only consider the tied sub-vector case for this
>> first version and keep discussing the unconstrained version. It is
>> seductively easy to allow this but impossible to take it back.
>>
>> ---
>>
>> The story is different when we talk only(!) about memory accesses and
>> having different vector sizes in the operands and the transferred type
>> (result type for loads, value operand type for stores):
>>
>> Eg on AVX, this call could turn into a 64bit gather operation of pairs of
>> floats:
>>
>>     <16 x float> llvm.evl.gather.v16f32(<8 x float*> %Ptr, <8 x i1> mask %M, i32 vlen 8)
>>
>> Is that IR you'd expect someone to generate (or a backend to consume) for
> this operation? It seems like a rather unnatural or "magical" way to
> represent the intent (load 64b each from 8 pointers), at least with the way
> I'm thinking about it. I'd expect a gather of 8xi64 and a bitcast.
>
>> And there is a native 16 x 16 element load (VLD2D) on SX-Aurora, which
>> may be represented as:
>>
>>     <scalable 256 x double> llvm.evl.gather.nxv16f64(<scalable 16 x double*> %Ptr, <scalable 16 x i1> mask %M, i32 vlen 16)
>>
>> In contrast to the above I can't very well say one should write this as a
> gather of i1024, but it also seems like a rather specialized instruction
> (presumably used for blocked processing of matrices?) so I can't say that
> this on its own motivates me to complicate a proposed core IR construct.
>
> Cheers,
> Robin
>
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