[LLVMdev] Vector LLVM extension v.s. DirectX Shaders

[Tzu-Chien Chiu]

2005/12/16, Chris Lattner <sabre at nondot.org>:
> > _Almost each_ instruction specifies different write masks and
> > swizzles. There will be a lot of extract, combine, and permute LLVA
> > instructions. It may make the transformations difficult to match a
> > certain pattern in the program semantic tree. For example, to match
> > 'mul' and 'add', and merge them to a single instruction 'mad'
> > (multiple-and-add).
>
> I don't really buy that.  Why do you think it will be hard?  This is
> exactly what pattern-matching instruction selectors do.

For example, to match the 'mul' followed by an 'add' to be a single
'mad', there could be several patterns because of the vector
manipulation instructions.

  y = A * B + C

They could simply be:

  x = mul A, B
  y = add x, C

or:
  x = mul A, B
  x_ = permute x
  y = add x_, C

or:
  x = mul A, B
  x_ = permute x
  C_ = permute C
  y = add x_, C_

or:
  x = mul A, B
  C_ = permute C
  y = add x, C_

or:
  x = mul A, B
  y_ = add x, C
  y = apply_write_mask y (select and combine)

All of above instruction sequence could be selected to be the
following machine instruction:

  // swizzle = permute
  y.writemask = mad A.permute, B.permute, C.permute

This is probably not a good example for a frontend transformation, but
I just wanna to point out the potential difficulty to implement a
frontend pass.

--
Tzu-Chien Chiu - XGI Technology, Inc.
URL: http://www.csie.nctu.edu.tw/~jwchiu/