just  to qualify, I think we are talking about RVA22 (application target) and not RVM22 (microcontroller target).

On Fri, Jul 9, 2021 at 8:07 AM Jan Wassenberg via lists.riscv.org <janwas=google.com@...> wrote:

Mentioned by Krste in the meeting: processor profile already requires VLEN >= 128.

On Fri, Jul 9, 2021 at 2:51 PM Jan Wassenberg via lists.riscv.org <janwas=google.com@...> wrote:

A topic to discuss: lower bound on VLEN.

The upper bound is helpful but even VL-agnostic code sometimes wants at least 128 bits.

Example: N parallel instances of AES (16 bytes each), or N 128-bit results from 64x64 normal or carryless multiplication.

We can get this already (assuming SEW_LMUL1MAX = 64) by setting LMUL=2, but it seems like a poor tradeoff that

software should halve the number of registers/groups, just so that hardware could theoretically have single-element vectors.

Can we mandate VLEN >= 2*SEW_LMUL1MAX, perhaps in a profile? That would help software :)

BTW, are we intending to have the same binaries work on different implementations? It seems the only way to discover SEW_LMUL1MAX

is to try various SEW/LMUL and check for vill. Because LMUL is baked into the intrinsic function name,

software that wants portable binaries would have to recompile all vector code for LMUL=1,2,4,8, and then

pick the first one that works.

That's very burdensome, a profile guaranteeing SEW_LMUL1MAX = 64 or at least LMUL2MAX = 64 would also help a lot.

On Fri, Jul 9, 2021 at 6:58 AM Krste Asanovic <krste@...> wrote:

We’ll meet tomorrow to see if there are any remaining concerns before going Into public review,
Krste