EAN: 9783031006180

SYNTHESIS LECTURES ON COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE S...

Having hit power limitations to even more aggressive out-of-order execution in processor cores
many architects in the past decade have turned to single-instruction-multiple-data (SIMD)
execution to increase single-threaded performance. SIMD execution  or having a single
instruction drive execution of an identical operation on multiple data items  was already well
established as a technique to efficiently exploit data parallelism. Furthermore  support for it
was already included in many commodity processors. However  in the past decade  SIMD execution
has seen a dramatic increase in the set of applications using it  which has motivated big
improvements in hardware support in mainstream microprocessors. The easiest way to provide a
big performance boost to SIMD hardware is to make it wider-i.e.  increase the number of data
items hardware operates on simultaneously. Indeed  microprocessor vendors have done this.
However  as we exploit more data parallelism in applications  certain challenges can negatively
impact performance. In particular  conditional execution  non-contiguous memory accesses  and
the presence of some dependences across data items are key roadblocks to achieving peak
performance with SIMD execution. This book first describes data parallelism  and why it is so
common in popular applications. We then describe SIMD execution  and explain where its
performance and energy benefits come from compared to other techniques to exploit parallelism.
Finally  we describe SIMD hardware support in current commodity microprocessors. This includes
both expected design tradeoffs  as well as unexpected ones  as we work to overcome challenges
encountered when trying to map real software to SIMD execution.

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