More work on history.

pull/69/head
Bill Schmidt 5 years ago
parent d8e780934e
commit 215118d024

@ -15,7 +15,7 @@
-->
<chapter version="5.0" xml:lang="en" xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook" xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xml:id="section_biendian">
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xml:id="VIPR.biendian">
<!-- Chapter Title goes here. -->
<title>The Power Bi-Endian Programming Model</title>

@ -72,18 +72,61 @@ xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xml:id="section_intro">
server family.
</para>
<para>
Next talk about VSX introduced for P7. Changes in registers and
types.
IBM extended VMX by introducing the Vector-Scalar Extension
(VSX) for the POWER7 family of processors. VSX adds 64 logical
Vector Scalar Registers (VSRs); however, to optimize the amount
of per-process register state, the registers overlap with the
VRs and the scalar floating-point registers (FPRs) (see <xref
linkend="VIPR.intro.unified" />). The VSRs can represent all
the data types representable by the VRs, and can also be treated
as containing two 64-bit integers or two 64-bit double-precision
floating-point values.
</para>
<para>
Both the VMX and VSX instruction sets have been expanded for the
POWER8 and POWER9 processor families. Starting with POWER8,
a VSR can now contain a single 128-bit integer; and starting
with POWER9, a VSR can contain a single 128-bit floating-point
value. The VMX and VSX instruction sets together may be
referred to as the POWER SIMD (single-instruction,
multiple-data) instructions.
</para>
<section>
<title>Little-Endian Linux</title>
<para>
Yes, it caused a lot of problems. See chapter on this.
The POWER architecture has supported operation in either
big-endian (BE) or little-endian (LE) mode from the
beginning. However, IBM's POWER servers were only shipped
with big-endian operating systems (AIX, Linux, i5/OS) prior to
the introduction of POWER8. With POWER8, IBM began
supporting little-endian Linux distributions for the first
time, and introduced a new application binary interface (the
64-Bit ELFv2 ABI Specification <xref
linkend="VIPR.intro.links" />) that can be used for either
big- or little-endian support. In practice, the ELFv2 ABI is
currently used only for little-endian Linux.
</para>
<para>
Although POWER has always supported big- and little-endian
memory accesses, the introduction of vector register support
added a layer of complexity to programming for processors
operating in different endian modes. Arrays of elements
loaded into a VR or VSR will be indexed from left to right in
the register in big-endian mode, but will be indexed from
right to left in the register in little-endian mode. However,
the VMX and VSX instructions originally assumed that elements
will always be indexed from left to right in the register.
This is an inconvenience that needs to be hidden from the
application programmer wherever possible. To this end, IBM
developed a bi-endian vector programming model (see <xref
linkend="VIPR.biendian" />). The intrinsic functions provided
for the bi-endian vector programming model are described in
<xref linkend="VIPR.vec-ref" />.
</para>
</section>
</section>

<section>
<section xml:id="VIPR.intro.unified">
<title>The Unified Vector Register Set</title>
<para>filler</para>
</section>

@ -15,7 +15,7 @@
-->
<chapter version="5.0" xml:lang="en" xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook" xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xml:id="section_vec_intrinsics">
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xml:id="VIPR.vec-ref">
<!-- Chapter Title goes here. -->
<title>Vector Intrinsic Reference</title>

Loading…
Cancel
Save