[LLVMdev] RFC: AVX Feature Specification

[David Greene]

I've been working on adding AVX to LLVM and have run across a number of 
questions.  Here's the first one.

In some ways AVX is "just another" SSE level.  Having AVX implies you have 
SSE1-SSE4.2.  However AVX is very different from SSE and there are a number
of sub-features which may or may not be available on various implementations.

So right now I've done this:

def FeatureYMM     : SubtargetFeature<"ymm", "X86YMM", "true", // Cray
                                      "Enable YMM state">;
def FeatureVEX     : SubtargetFeature<"vex", "X86VEX", "true", // Cray
                                      "Enable VEX prefix">;
def FeatureFMA     : SubtargetFeature<"fma", "X86FMA", "true", // Cray
                                      "Enable fused multiply-add">;
def FeatureAVX     : SubtargetFeature<"avx", "X86AVX", "true", // Cray
                                      "Enable AVX instructions",
                                      [FeatureSSE42, FeatureYMM, FeatureVEX]>;

YMM, VEX and FMA are all separate features detectable through CPUID.

The key question here is whether making X86AVX a boolean feature flag separate 
from X86SSELevel is reasonable.

As I've been going along I've added feature flags for SSE4a and SSE5.  These 
really do need to be separate feature flags because having SSE4a and/or SSE5 
does not imply that you have SSE4.2 or SSE4.1.  So they can't be part of the 
X86SSELevel scheme.

Opinions on whether AVX should be a separate flag or an SSELevel are welcome.
Perhaps we need to retink the whole SSELevel scheme now that AMD and Intel are 
diverging.  My prediction is that AMD will dump SSE5 and go with AVX 
eventually, similarly to what happened with 3dNow.  AVX is simply far 
techincally superior.

                                           -Dave