**Revision History**
-* v0.00 05may2021 first created
-* v0.01 06may2021 initial first draft
-* v0.02 08may2021 add scenarios / use-cases
-* v0.03 09may2021 add draft image for scenario
-* v0.04 14may2021 add appendix with other research
+* v0.00 05may2022 first created
+* v0.01 06may2022 initial first draft
+* v0.02 08may2022 add scenarios / use-cases
+* v0.03 09may2022 add draft image for scenario
+* v0.04 14may2022 add appendix with other research
+* v0.05 14jun2022 update images (thanks to Veera)
**Table of Contents**
including simulators and compilers: OpenRISC 1200 took 12 years to
mature. Stable Open ISAs require Standards and Compliance Suites that
take more. A Vector or Packed SIMD ISA to reach stable *general-purpose*
-auto-vectorisation compiler support has never been achieved in the
+auto-vectorization compiler support has never been achieved in the
history of computing, not with the combined resources of ARM, Intel,
AMD, MIPS, Sun Microsystems, SGI, Cray, and many more. (*Hand-crafted
assembler and direct use of intrinsics is the Industry-standard norm
Slowly, at this point, a realisation should be sinking in that, actually,
there aren't as many really truly viable Vector ISAs out there, as the
-ones that are evolving in the general direction of Vectorisation are,
+ones that are evolving in the general direction of Vectorization are,
in various completely different ways, flawed.
**Successfully identifying a limitation marks the beginning of an
The question then becomes: with all the duplication of arithmetic
operations just to make the registers scalar or vector, why not
leverage the *existing* Scalar ISA with some sort of "context"
-or prefix that augments its behaviour? Make "Scalar instruction"
+or prefix that augments its behaviour? Separate out the
+"looping" from "thing being looped on" (the elements),
+make "Scalar instruction"
synonymous with "Vector Element instruction" and through nothing
more than contextual
augmentation the Scalar ISA *becomes* the Vector ISA.
phase is greatly simplified, reducing design complexity and leaving
plenty of headroom for further expansion.
+[[!img "svp64-primer/img/power_pipelines.svg" ]]
+
Remarkably this is not a new idea. Intel's x86 `REP` instruction
-gives the base concept, but in 1994 it was Peter Hsu, the designer
+gives the base concept, and the Z80 had something similar.
+But in 1994 it was Peter Hsu, the designer
of the MIPS R8000, who first came up with the idea of Vector-augmented
prefixing of an existing Scalar ISA. Relying on a multi-issue Out-of-Order Execution Engine,
the prefix would mark which of the registers were to be treated as
Engine. The only reason that the team did not take this forward
into a commercial product
was because they could not work out how to cleanly do OoO
-multi-issue at the time.
+multi-issue at the time (leveraging Multi-Issue is the most logical
+way to exploit the Vector-Prefix concept)
In its simplest form, then, this "prefixing" idea is a matter
of:
sequential carry-flag chaining of these scalar instructions.
* The Condition Register Fields of the Power ISA make a great candidate
for use as Predicate Masks, particularly when combined with
- Vectorised `cmp` and Vectorised `crand`, `crxor` etc.
+ Vectorized `cmp` and Vectorized `crand`, `crxor` etc.
It is only when looking slightly deeper into the Power ISA that
certain things turn out to be missing, and this is down in part to IBM's
so Scalar ones. Examples include that transfer operations between the
Integer and Floating-point Scalar register files were dropped approximately
a decade ago after the Packed SIMD variants were considered to be
-duplicates. With it being completely inappropriate to attempt to Vectorise
+duplicates. With it being completely inappropriate to attempt to Vectorize
a Packed SIMD ISA designed 20 years ago with no Predication of any kind,
-the Scalar ISA, a much better all-round candidate for Vectorisation
+the Scalar ISA, a much better all-round candidate for Vectorization
(the Scalar parts of Power ISA) is left anaemic.
A particular key instruction that is missing is `MV.X` which is
expensive instruction causing a huge swathe of Register Hazards
in one single hit is almost never added to a Scalar ISA but
is almost always added to a Vector one. When `MV.X` is
-Vectorised it allows for arbitrary
+Vectorized it allows for arbitrary
remapping of elements within a Vector to positions specified
by another Vector. A typical Scalar ISA will use Memory to
achieve this task, but with Vector ISAs the Vector Register Files are
in Multi-Chip-Module (aka "Chiplet") form, giving all the advantages of
the performance boost that goes with smaller line-drivers.
-
-Draft Image (placeholder):
-
-<img src="/openpower/sv/bridge_phy.jpg" width=800 />
+<img src="/openpower/sv/bridge_phy.svg" width=600 />
# Transparently-Distributed Vector Processing
have to be "massaged" by tools that insert intrinsics into the
source code, in order to identify the Basic Blocks that the Zero-Overhead
Loops can run. Can this be merged into standard gcc and llvm
-compilers? As intrinsics: of course. Can it become part of auto-vectorisation? Probably,
+compilers? As intrinsics: of course. Can it become part of auto-vectorization? Probably,
if an infinite supply of money and engineering time is thrown at it.
Is a half-way-house solution of compiler intrinsics good enough?
Intel, ARM, MIPS, Power ISA and RISC-V have all already said "yes" on that,
**Use-case: Matrix and Convolutions**
+<img src="/openpower/sv/sv_horizontal_vs_vertical.svg" />
+
First, some important definitions, because there are two different
-Vectorisation Modes in SVP64:
+Vectorization Modes in SVP64:
* **Horizontal-First**: (aka standard Cray Vectors) walk
through **elements** first before moving to next **instruction**
moving to next **element**. Currently managed by `svstep`,
ZOLC may be deployed to manage the stepping, in a Deterministic manner.
+Second:
+SVP64 Draft Matrix Multiply is currently set up to arrange a Schedule
+of Multiply-and-Accumulates, suitable for pipelining, that will,
+ultimately, result in a Matrix Multiply. Normal processors are forced
+to perform "loop-unrolling" in order to achieve this same Schedule.
+SIMD processors are further forced into a situation of pre-arranging rotated
+copies of data if the Matrices are not exactly on a power-of-two boundary.
+
+The current limitation of SVP64 however is (when Horizontal-First
+is deployed, at least, which is the least number of instructions)
+that both source and destination Matrices have to be in-registers,
+in full. Vertical-First may be used to perform a LD/ST within
+the loop, covered by `svstep`, but it is still not ideal. This
+is where the Snitch and EXTRA-V concepts kick in.
+
+<img src="/openpower/sv/matrix_svremap.svg" />
+
Imagine a large Matrix scenario, with several values close to zero that
could be skipped: no need to include zero-multiplications, but a
traditional CPU in no way can help: only by loading the data through
the L1-L4 Cache and Virtual Memory Barriers is it possible to
ascertain, retrospectively, that time and power had just been wasted.
-SVP64 is able to do what is termed "Vertical-First" Vectorisation,
+SVP64 is able to do what is termed "Vertical-First" Vectorization,
combined with SVREMAP Matrix Schedules. Imagine that SVREMAP has been
extended, Snitch-style, to perform a deterministic memory-array walk of
a large Matrix.
The reason in this case for the use of Vertical-First Mode is the
conditional execution of the Multiply-and-Accumulate.
-Horizontal-First Mode is the standard Cray-Style Vectorisation:
+Horizontal-First Mode is the standard Cray-Style Vectorization:
loop on all *elements* with the same instruction before moving
on to the next instruction. Horizontal-First
Predication needs to be pre-calculated
Draft Image (placeholder):
-<img src="/openpower/sv/zolc_svp64_extrav.jpg" width=800 />
+<img src="/openpower/sv/zolc_svp64_extrav.svg" width=800 />
The program being executed is a simple loop with a conditional
test that ignores the multiply if the input is zero.
standing problem facing Computer Science and doing so in a way that
reduces power consumption reduces algorithm completion time and reduces
the need for complex hardware microarchitectures in favour of much
-smaller distributed coherent Processing Elements.
+smaller distributed coherent Processing Elements with a Heterogenous ISA
+across the board.
# Appendix
projects / libreriscv.git / blobdiff