Author Topic: AVX Builds  (Read 12333 times)

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Offline The E

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There are no SSE3 builds, so only SSE and AVX would be offered, and I would actually just cut out SSE, given that that will be usable by the most people.
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Offline Fury

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There are no SSE3 builds currently, but nothing stops from compiling them. All modern CPU's support SSE3 but not necessarily AVX, which would make SSE3 strong candidate for a standard build. Both SSE2 and SSE are in the minority now, but if SCP wants to keep some form of legacy support, then dropping SSE2 is the better choice IMO.

 

Offline chief1983

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If I recall, enabling SSE3 support was more difficult than how we've done it for SSE and SSE2 support in the MSVC project files, but I could be wrong.  Otherwise I'm surprised no one has done it yet.
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Offline Mongoose

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I'd rather we at least kept SSE2 if we're not able to get SSE3 enabled, since then all of us who don't support AVX will get as much of a performance boost as possible.  Considering just how ancient SSE-only processors are, I can't imagine any people still using them don't have some sort of newer hardware available.

 

Offline The E

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There are no SSE3 builds currently, but nothing stops from compiling them. All modern CPU's support SSE3 but not necessarily AVX, which would make SSE3 strong candidate for a standard build. Both SSE2 and SSE are in the minority now, but if SCP wants to keep some form of legacy support, then dropping SSE2 is the better choice IMO.

Except that the only reason we have support for those instruction sets is because the msvc compiler can automatically optimize for them. SSE3 is not supported in that regard, we would have to write that by hand.

So, dropping SSE2 makes exactly no sense.
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Offline pecenipicek

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for the record, all 64 bit processors support SSE2 at a minimum.
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Offline Fury

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There are no SSE3 builds currently, but nothing stops from compiling them. All modern CPU's support SSE3 but not necessarily AVX, which would make SSE3 strong candidate for a standard build. Both SSE2 and SSE are in the minority now, but if SCP wants to keep some form of legacy support, then dropping SSE2 is the better choice IMO.

Except that the only reason we have support for those instruction sets is because the msvc compiler can automatically optimize for them. SSE3 is not supported in that regard, we would have to write that by hand.

So, dropping SSE2 makes exactly no sense.

I didn't know that. I've only looked up GCC compiler options since that's what I intend to use, and it supports all of them starting from MMX to all the way to AVX2 and AVX512. I assumed MS compiler would have the same, but apparently that is not the case unless 2013 changes that.

Doesn't chief use GCC or something equivalent to build official SCP builds anyway, so what is the problem?

 

Offline The E

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No, the official windows builds are made using MSVC.

Also, have you looked at what SSE3 actually does? There isn't a lot of new functionality in there that is relevant to us. The new functions of SSE3 are mostly just variants of functions already introduced in SSE and SSE2; if the jump from SSE to SSE2 was marginal, the jump from SSE2 to 3 would be even more so. It is pretty safe to skip SSE3 unless you have a really specific need for it, which as far as I can tell we don't.
« Last Edit: October 16, 2013, 01:50:06 am by The E »
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I came from chasing dreams to feel alone
There must be changes, miss to feel strong
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I would hate for the nightly crew to have to do extra work to create additional build versions.  Based on these discussions (and Wikipedia), we don't need a SSE3 build as it is more complicated and offers no benefit. Based on the poll, we really don't need SSE anymore.
To keep the nightly process as simple as possible, should we just move forward with only these three builds?:
No-SSE
SSE2  (standard)
AVX

 

Offline chief1983

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I plan on moving to MSVC2012 soon, which is where support for these builds would be added.  Once done, making nightlies of them is merely a matter of editing the configuration line on the build machine that tells it which project configurations to build and release each night.  Someone else needs to actually make an AVX configuration in the 2012 project though, or I'll try to figure out how when I get 2012 installed.
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Offline The E

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I already did this several revisions ago :P
If I'm just aching this can't go on
I came from chasing dreams to feel alone
There must be changes, miss to feel strong
I really need lifе to touch me
--Evergrey, Where August Mourns