[LLVMdev] RFC: AVX Feature Specification

[Dan Gohman]

On Apr 30, 2009, at 3:02 PM, David Greene wrote:

> 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.

It sounds reasonable to me.

>
>
> 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.

I think it's reasonable to use separate flags for the AVX features.
If there's ever any code that needs to test whether the target has
both AVX and a particular SSE level at the same time, the code
will just have to check both conditions.

Offhand, I'd say SSE4a and SSE5 ought to be separate flags too.

Dan