Agner`s CPU blog

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Proposal for instruction set - now on Github
Author:  Date: 2016-08-31 06:56
Agner wrote:
The Itanium did not have success with "explicit parallelism" because it was too difficult to handle for the compiler. Maybe "explicit caching" will be easier to handle. You might want to specify explicit caching for the top of the stack in the innermost loop or for often-used constants, jump tables or global variables.

Another possibility would be to reserve the extra cache for a particularly critical process. This process would monopolize the extra cache in one or more CPU cores while less important processes would be prevented from accessing it. That's an extra complication for the operating system to keep track of, but it is a quite common scenario that one process is speed-critical while all other processes are unimportant background processes.

Another possibility, which is perhaps simpler to handle, is an extra set of registers which are used for extra storage. Assume, for example, that we supplement the vector registers v0 - v31 by an extra set of vector registers w0 - w31. The extra registers can perhaps do nothing but read and write, e.g.

        w8 = v5;
        v2 = w8;
These extra registers can be used for often-used constants, for global variables, and for temporarily storing a normal register rather than saving it on the stack.

With an extra set of registers you have the complication of calling conventions. ForwardCom has a mechanism for telling the compiler which registers are modified by e.g. a library function. This mechanism could be extended to the extra registers. A library function could save a callee-save register to an extra register rather than saving it on the stack and reserve this extra register by indicating in the object file which extra registers it is using. The extra registers still have to be saved at every task switch if they are used.



I like your idea of the extra registers that do nothing but read/write. The key of what I want is stability and perhaps determinism in being able to cache application-specific data, constants, masks, etc. The CPU cache right now is a jungle.


I'm thinking about other ways to improve code density and decode efficiency. 1) Turn time or sequence into information. For example, maybe some instructions are only allowed at the start of a process. After a certain milestone, some instruction codes switch to represent different instructions – instructions that cannot be used at the start of a process, only after the milestone. This allows you to encode more instructions in the same 32-bit space. Are there any instructions that will never be used at the beginning of a program/process? 2) More efficient data types, beyond integers and floats. For example, I wonder if we could use a powers-of-two type, such that the literal binary value would represent an exponent of two, e.g. 10001101 would mean 2^141. Something like that would help with encoding some large numbers, though powers of two might not be the right form. Relatedly, instead of hard-coding a single constant like π the way I was thinking several months ago, there could be a type that represented a set of constants – maybe four or five bits to encode 16 to 32 predesignated constants that were empirically determined to recur frequently enough in a wide range of applications to be worth encoding. This would basically be a predefined static dictionary. It could be stuff like 32-bit pi, 64-bit pi, etc. or maybe no version of pi would make the cut. I have no idea. Do you think there are a set of a dozen or more constants that would be useful to put in a dictionary?


And I wonder about simpler, more specialized cores. Right now you've got all these powerful AVX, AVX2, BMI, FMA, TSX instructions and all the legacy x86 and 386 instructions supported on every single core. Maybe it would make sense to have a couple of Turbo cores or something that were SIMD-only, or optimized for heavy compute or HPC workloads. There's been some research on how to design a processor tailored for OpenCL, for example. Maybe ForwardCom could have a simpler, faster subset of the ISA designed for highly parallelized applications using OpenMP, OpenCL, or something like Threaded Building Blocks. It would be like Big/Little, but more specifically aimed at high performance parallel code in the little cores. A new ISA doesn't have the backwards compatibility constraints Intel is limited by, where they throw the kitchen sink into every core.

 
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