+[[!tag standards]]
+
# SV Vector Prefix Swizzle
+* <https://bugs.libre-soc.org/show_bug.cgi?id=139>
+* <https://libre-soc.org/simple_v_extension/specification/mv.x/>
+
3D GPU operations on batches of vec2, vec3 and vec4 often require re-ordering of the elements in an "out of lane" fashion with respect to standard high performance non-GPU-centric Vector Processors. Examples include:
* Normalisation of Vectors of XYZ with respect to one dimension
-* Alteration of ARGB pixel vectors wuth respect to opacity (A)
+* Alteration of ARGB pixel vectors with respect to opacity (A)
* Adjustment of YUV vectors with respect to luminosity
and many more. Lane-based Vector Processors not having the 2/3/4 inter-lane crossing have some difficulty processing such data and require it to be pushed into memory and retrieved, which is prohibitively costly in both instructions, time, and power consumption.
-The cost is so great and the requirement so common that it easily justifies augmenting the ISA of a GPU to be able to specify the reordering of vec2/3/4 elements, often drastically increasing the instruction size in the process.
+The lane reordering cost is so great and the requirement so common that it easily justifies augmenting the ISA of a GPU to be able to specify the reordering of vec2/3/4 elements, often drastically increasing the instruction size in the process.
The reason for the dramatic increase is that the reordering of each element in vec4 requires 2 bits per element, plus a predicate mask. This means a minimum of 3 bits per element: 12 bits for a vec4, and if there are 2 src operands this is a whopping 24 bits of immediate data, per instruction.
There is also benefit to encoding some useful immediates into src operands, on a per sub-element basis: being able to specify for example that the Z element of a vec4 is to be 1.0 saves a complex LD-immediate merging operation for that lane.
+# Options
+
+## Predication plus indices
+
+* 4 bits for predication
+* 2 bits per element
+
+## SUBVL plus indices
+
+* SUBVL specifies the length (vec2/3/4)
+* However index selection is 2 bits per element
+* Therefore the src SUBVL must be separate and distinct from the dest SUBVL
+
+## Predication mixed with immediates and indices
+
+* Three bits per element.
+* One encoding (0b000) indicates "mask"
+* Four encodings (0b1NN) indicate vec4 selection
+* Three remaining indices indicate constants
+ - 0 (or 0.0)
+ - 1 (or 1.0)
+ - -1 (or -1.0) or some other option?
+
+# mv.swizzle
+
+is definitely needed. TBD encoding. requires 1 src, 1 dest, and 12 bits immediate minimum.
+
+[[sv/mv.swizzle]]