Skip to content

0.5.0
Compare
Choose a tag to compare
@nemequ nemequ released this 22 Jun 19:10
· 1272 commits to master since this release
v0.5.0
2931676

I’m pleased to announce the availability of the first release of SIMD
Everywhere (SIMDe),
version 0.5.0,
representing more than three years of work by over a dozen developers.

SIMDe is a permissively-licensed (MIT) header-only library which
provides fast, portable implementations of
SIMD intrinsics for platforms
which aren’t natively supported by the API in question.

For example, with SIMDe you can use
SSE on
ARM,
POWER,
WebAssembly, or almost any platform with a
C compiler. That includes, of course, x86 CPUs which don't support
the ISA extension is question (e.g., calling AVX-512F functions on a
CPU which doesn't natively support them).

If the target natively supports the SIMD extension in question there
is no performance penalty for using SIMDe. Otherwise, accelerated
implementations, such as NEON on ARM, AltiVec on POWER, WASM SIMD on
WebAssembly, etc., are used when available to provide good
performance.

SIMDe has already been used to port several packages to additional
architectures through either upstream support or distribution
packages, particularly on
Debian.

If you'd like to play with SIMDe online, you can do so on Compiler
Explorer.

What is in 0.5.0

The 0.5.0 release is SIMDe’s first release. It includes complete
implementations of:

  • MMX
  • SSE
  • SSE2
  • SSE3
  • SSSE3
  • SSE4.1
  • AVX
  • FMA
  • GFNI

We also have rapidly progressing implementations of many other
extensions including NEON, AVX2, SVML, and several AVX-512 extensions
(AVX-512F, AVX-512BW, AVX-512VL, etc.).

Additionally, we have an extensive test suite to verify our
implementations.

What is coming next

Work on SIMDe is proceeding rapidly, but there are a lot of functions
to implement… x86 alone has about 6,000 SIMD functions, and we’ve
implemented about 2,000 of them. We will keep adding more functions
and improving the implementations we already have.

Our NEON implementation is being worked on very actively right now
by Sean Maher and Christopher Moore, and is expected to continue
progressing rapidly.

We currently have two Google Summer of Code students working on the
project as well; Hidayat
Khan
is working on finishing up AVX2, and Himanshi
Mathur is focused on SVML.

If you're interested in using SIMDe but need some specific functions
to be implemented first, please file an
issue and we may
be able to prioritize those functions.

Getting Involved

If you're interested in helping out please get in touch. We have a
chat room on Gitter
which is fairly active if you have questions, or of course you can
just dive right in on the issue
tracker.

Assets 2
Loading