Why Ice Lake is Important – a bit-basher’s perspective

Why Ice Lake is Important – a bit-basher’s perspective

This is a handy building block and would have been nice to have while building Hyperscan – we spend a lot of time working around the fact that it’s hard to move bits around a SIMD register (one of these double-shifts, plus a coarse-grained shuffle, would allow bit-shuffles across SIMD registers). One could also view GF2P8AFFINEQB as something where the 8-bit values are ‘fixed’ and the 64-bit values are unknown – this would allow the user to, say, extract bits 0,8,16… from a 64-bit value and put it in byte 0, as well as 1,9,17,… and put it in byte 1, etc. – thus doing a 8×8 bit matrix transpose of our 64-bit values. From an integer-focused programmer’s perspective, ICL/SNC adds a huge collection of instructions that allow us – in many cases for the first time – to move bits and bytes around within SIMD registers in complex and useful ways.

Source: branchfree.org