Coalescing adjacent gather/scatter operations

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-2016103684-A1
Application number	US-201514976216-A
Country	US
Kind code	A1
Filing date	Dec 21, 2015
Priority date	Dec 26, 2012
Publication date	Apr 14, 2016
Grant date	—

Abstract

According to one embodiment, a processor includes an instruction decoder to decode a first instruction to gather data elements from memory, the first instruction having a first operand specifying a first storage location and a second operand specifying a first memory address storing a plurality of data elements. The processor further includes an execution unit coupled to the instruction decoder, in response to the first instruction, to read contiguous a first and a second of the data elements from a memory location based on the first memory address indicated by the second operand, and to store the first data element in a first entry of the first storage location and a second data element in a second entry of a second storage location corresponding to the first entry of the first storage location.

First claim

What is claimed is:

1 . A processor comprising:
a plurality of 64-bit general-purpose registers; a plurality of 128-bit single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) registers; a data cache; an instruction cache; a level 2 (L2) cache coupled to the data cache and coupled to the instruction cache; a branch prediction unit; an instruction translation lookaside buffer (TLB) coupled to the instruction cache; an instruction fetch unit; a decode unit coupled to the instruction fetch unit, the decode unit to decode a plurality of instructions, including a first instruction, the first instruction to indicate a 128-bit operand size, the first instruction having a first field to specify a first 128-bit SIMD destination register of the plurality of 128-bit SIMD registers, the first instruction having a second field to specify a 64-bit general-purpose register of the plurality of 64-bit general-purpose registers to store a base address, and the first instruction to indicate a data element width of 64-bits; and an execution unit coupled to the decode unit, coupled to the plurality of 128-bit SIMD registers, and coupled to the plurality of 64-bit general-purpose registers, the execution unit to: load a first structure and a second structure from a memory based on the base address, the first structure to include a first 64-bit data element, a second 64-bit data element, and a third 64-bit data element, the second structure to include a first 64-bit data element, a second 64-bit data element, and a third 64-bit data element, wherein the first 64-bit data element, the second 64-bit data element, and the third 64-bit data element of the first structure are to be consecutive elements in the memory, and wherein the first 64-bit data element, the second 64-bit data element, and the third 64-bit data element of the second structure are to be consecutive elements in the memory; and store the first 64-bit data element of the first structure as a first 64-bit data element of the first 128-bit SIMD destination register, the second 64-bit data element of the first structure as a first 64-bit data element of a second 128-bit SIMD destination register, the third 64-bit data element of the first structure as a first 64-bit data element of a third 128-bit SIMD destination register, the first 64-bit data element of the second structure as a second 64-bit data element of the first 128-bit SIMD destination register, the second 64-bit data element of the second structure as a second 64-bit data element of the second 128-bit SIMD destination register, and the third 64-bit data element of the second structure as a second 64-bit data element of the third 128-bit SIMD destination register, wherein the first 64-bit data element of the first 128-bit SIMD destination register is to include least significant bits of the first 128-bit SIMD destination register, wherein the first 64-bit data element of the second 128-bit SIMD destination register is to include least significant bits of the second 128-bit SIMD destination register, and wherein the first 64-bit data element of the third 128-bit SIMD destination register is to include least significant bits of the third 128-bit SIMD destination register.

2 . The processor of claim 1 , wherein the first instruction has a data element width field to indicate the data element width of 64-bits.

3 . The processor of claim 1 , wherein a single bit of the first instruction is to indicate the 128-bit operand size.

4 . The processor of claim 1 , wherein the first, second, and third 128-bit SIMD destination registers are a sequence of registers.

5 . The processor of claim 1 , wherein the processor has a reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architecture.

6 . The processor of claim 1 , comprising a reorder buffer.

Assignees

• Intel Corp

Inventors

• Forsyth Andrew T
• Hickmann Brian J
• Hall Jonathan C
• Hughes Christopher J

Classifications

• G06F9/30181

  Instruction operation extension or modification · CPC title

• G06F13/4282

  on a serial bus, e.g. I2C bus, SPI bus (on daisy chain buses G06F13/4247) · CPC title

• G06F9/30043

  LOAD or STORE instructions; Clear instruction · CPC title

• G06F9/30145

  Instruction analysis, e.g. decoding, instruction word fields · CPC title

• G06F9/3836

  Instruction issuing, e.g. dynamic instruction scheduling or out of order instruction execution · CPC title