doi.org
Improving Predication Efficiency through Compaction/Restoration of SIMD Instructions
February 2020 • Adrián Barredo, Juan M. Cebrián, Miquel Moretó, Marc Casas, Mateo Valero
Vector processors offer a wide range of unexplored opportunities to improve performance and energy efficiency. However, despite its potential, vector code generation and execution have significant challenges, the most relevant ones being control flow divergence. Most modern processors including SIMD extensions (such as AVX) rely on predication to support divergence control. In predicated codes, performance and energy consumption are usually insensitive to the number of true values in a predicated mask. This implie…