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I'm not advocating against using vectorization/SIMD. Of course people should eek every bit of performance out. The point is that the average developers job in

I'm not advocating against using vectorization/SIMD. Of course people should eek every bit of performance out. The point is that the average developers job in achieving this is not knowing every SIMD primitive for every platform. It is almost always folly to ever touch a platform's SIMD instructions unless you're one of the aforementioned library/compiler developers. Instead the ordinary developer is usually best served by using equipped libraries and understand how to structure code where it can enable vectorization. Whether it's Eigen, or even the C++ compiler (which, in my experience, is often excellent at vectorizing code), or the Accelerate library on Apple platforms. These things mean that your code can adapt and exploit every possible platform they're deployed to, versus Jimmy SIMD who carefully made his SSE 3.2 instructions and his code was then lost in time.

vectorcamp 1y ago
I agree. Most developers don't need to write SIMD code. Some do however and those need good documentation to write good SIMD code, even more so when it comes to porting. Interesting that you mention Eigen. Long before I started my company VectorCamp, wrote the original Altivec/VSX, Arm and Z ports for Eigen and it took me a lot more to do a proper port back then -iirc I started that effort in 2008- than it would take me now, because now the tools are far far better. I started this company to provide SIMD optimizations for all architectures and this tool SIMD.info began because I wanted to help other developers find the information that I wish I had back then. It's that simple. For me and my company, anything that needs to be performant critical to be written in a compiled language like C, C++, Rust -and now Zig- is worth optimizing. How much depends on your time, money and skills. Not everything needs SIMD of course. But it's definitely NOT only for library and compiler developers. You would be surprised how much SIMD code is even in application code out there. It all depends on the expectations and the required performance. Also, some of the libraries don't utilize all available instructions. My 2c.

vectorcamp 1y ago

I agree. Most developers don't need to write SIMD code. Some do however and those need good documentation to write good SIMD code, even more so when it comes to porting. Interesting that you mention Eigen. Long before I started my company VectorCamp, wrote the original Altivec/VSX, Arm and Z ports for Eigen and it took me a lot more to do a proper port back then -iirc I started that effort in 2008- than it would take me now, because now the tools are far far better. I started this company to provide SIMD optimizations for all architectures and this tool SIMD.info began because I wanted to help other developers find the information that I wish I had back then. It's that simple. For me and my company, anything that needs to be performant critical to be written in a compiled language like C, C++, Rust -and now Zig- is worth optimizing. How much depends on your time, money and skills. Not everything needs SIMD of course. But it's definitely NOT only for library and compiler developers. You would be surprised how much SIMD code is even in application code out there. It all depends on the expectations and the required performance. Also, some of the libraries don't utilize all available instructions. My 2c.