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Whole-function vectorization and conditionals
Author: Agner Date: 2016-08-15 10:53
Sylvain Collange wrote:
my point is that the mask could be part of the ABI, just as vector length (implicitly) is. This would enable vectorization-agnostic composition of function calls.
A function may have an unlimited number of input parameters and an unlimited number of outputs (through pointers or references or class members or whatever, all of which could in principle have different masks. That would add a lot of complexity to the ABI for something that is rarely needed. I prefer to specify a mask as an explicit function parameter in the rare cases that it is needed.
By the way, have you considered the micro-architecture and compiler implications of using a subset of vector registers as masks?
A lot of instructions in current instruction sets are using certain registers for specific purposes. I don't think this is a big problem. It is a much bigger problem to have a separate set of registers for masks only, as AVX512 has, in my opinion.
Instructions take up 5 input operands from vector registers (RS, RT, RU, Mask, RD). The old register value RD is required to merge the result.
No, the first source operand is required to merge the result when masking. This happens to be the same as RD only if using an instruction format with too few register operands. This gives a maximum of 5 input dependencies. These are not required at the same stage in the pipeline. The execution stage has typically 2 or 3 input operands. A few unimportant optional instructions have 4 inputs. I added these instructions mainly for testing whether it is feasible to have four input operands.
The address calculation stage in the pipeline can have up to three input dependencies: base pointer, index and vector length (or block size). The architecture does not specify which stage in the pipeline reads the mask register. It could be somewhere between the address calculation stage and the execution stage if the number of register read ports is critical.

So, the total maximum number of input dependencies is five, but the maximum number of input dependencies at one stage in the pipeline can be limited to three if necessary. This is still a lot of complexity to handle for the scheduler, I agree. I have limited the number of output dependencies to one for the same reason. This limitation creates problems for add-with-carry and for integer overflow detection, but people have convinced me that it was more important to limit the number of output dependencies. x86 has two output dependencies on most instructions, including the flags and the floating point control/status registers.

Intel processors have traditionally had a limitation of two input dependencies for each micro-operation, but this has been increased to three in recent versions. AMD have never had any limitation on input dependencies. I don't know how expensive it is to have many read ports, but I prefer to have many read ports rather than splitting instructions into micro-operations. My idea is that a ForwardCom processor should not need to split instructions into micro-ops.

making the operation dependent on the former value of the architectural destination register defeats the purpose of register renaming: write-after-read dependencies are still there.
All superscalar processors handle this by renaming the register so that the input and output use two different physical registers.
A more acceptable implementation would break down each masked instruction into 2 µops: first a computation on the whole vector, then a merge (I believe that is how Knights Landing and Skylake handle masked AVX-512 instructions).
I have not been able to get my hands on any AVX-512 processor yet, so I am not able to test it. If you have any information on the microarchitecture of these processors then please give me a link.
More generally, masks encode control flow information, while vector registers encode data flow information.
The masking mechanism translates control flow into data flow. It does not change the dependency of the other input and output operands, as I explained above. If all elements of a vector are masked off then the hardware will still treat the input operand as a dependency and wait for it. You may want to convert this into a branch if the prediction rate is good.
 
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