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Why not just go to floating point?

I've been thinking of putting together a new desktop machine -- to replace the ancient Socket 754 AMD64 machine that is currently serving as a door stop -- and most likely it'd be Sandy Bridge based. The nice thing about this is that I'd then be able to experiment with Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX). Currently my main machine is a laptop with a Core i7, so the highest CPU insn set I have available is SSE 4.2. Of course, when I actually looked at AVX again, I found out to my disappointment that it's floating point only like SSE was, and the AVX2 integer version won't arrive until a future chip, which pretty much torpedoed most of the ideas I had for using it.

Why not just switch to floating point?

Well, the main reason is that it would nuke the benefit of trying to use AVX in the first place, which is higher parallelism. AVX uses 256-bit vectors instead of 128-bit vectors, so it can process twice the number of elements per operation and thus get double the throughput. However, most of the data I work with is in bytes, so going to 32-bit floats means dividing throughput by four. Multiplying by two and dividing by four doesn't work in your favor. Then there are other reasons:

It's definitely not just a question of switching to vector float types. That isn't to say there aren't advantages to going FP, of course:

AVX does appear to have some niceities for integer routines, like 3-argument syntax, but truth be told, I haven't had too many problems with excess register moves lately. It's a bit of a bummer to go from "yeah, this would probably run much faster with 256-bit vectors" to "hmm, I'd have to convert this to floats and then it would probably run slower." :-/

Comments

This blog was originally open for comments when this entry was first posted, but was later closed and then removed due to spam and after a migration away from the original blog software. Unfortunately, it would have been a lot of work to reformat the comments to republish them. The author thanks everyone who posted comments and added to the discussion.