Re: Vector TG minutes for 2020/12/18 meeting
Guy Lemieux
for vsetivli, with the uimm=00000 encoding, rather than setting vl to 32, how setting it to some other meaning? one option is to set vl=VLMAX. i have some concerns about software using this safely (eg, if VLMAX turns out to be much larger than software anticipated, then it would fail; correcting this requires more instructions than just using the regular vsetvl/vsetvli would have used). another option is to allow an implementation-defined vl to be chosen by hardware; this could be anywhere between 1 and VLMAX. for example, implementations may just choose vl=32, or they may choose something else. it allows the CPU architect to devise a scheme that best fits the implementation. this may consider factors like the effective width of the execution engine, the pipeline depth (to reduce likelihood of stalls from dependent instructions), or that the vector register file is actually a multi-level memory hierarchy where some smaller values may operate with greater efficiency (lower power), or matching VL to the optimal memory system burst length. perhaps some guidance by the spec could be given here for the default scheme, eg whether the implementation optimizes for best performance or power (while still allowing implementations to modify this default via an implementation-defined CSR). software using a few extra cycles to check the returned vl against AVL should not a big problem (the simplest solution being vsetvli followed by vsetivli) g
On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 6:13 PM Krste Asanovic <krste@...> wrote:
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