[Libre-soc-dev] svp64

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Tuesday, December 22, 2020, Cole Poirier <colepoirier at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's almost as if the original designers and subsequent contributors
> to the POWER ISA over the past 25 years knew what they were doing!

they probably did, given the success it had in the PS3.

however: look at the instruction count of VSX.  sonewhere around 700 i
think.  this because it is SIMD-with-a-smidgen-of-Vector ops.

so the sigarch "SIMD Considered Harmful" article definitely applies.

now look at RVV.  the Vector ISA *more than doubles* the instruction count
of RV64GC.

yet, to get a Vector ISA that is a peer of RVV we add... 5 to 8
instructions to an OpenPOWER *Scalar* ISA?

the point being: the exact same argument that was applied *by the
developers of RVV* to SIMD apply just as equally to the opcode
proliferation that is embedded into RVV itself, although RVV is less
harmful.

this is the point of the abstraction prefixing in SV: don't create separate
vector instructions, because you're only duplicating the scalar ISA in
about 95% of cases.

underneath, SV is a handful, like hanging on to a pissed-off bunch of
howling wolves with their tails knotted together, but hey.

l



-- 
---
crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68