Towards fearless SIMD, 7 years later
a year ago
- #SIMD
- #Performance
- #Rust
- Rust's SIMD programming experience remains challenging despite progress, with all SIMD intrinsics marked as unsafe due to varying CPU support.
- Linebender projects are beginning to adopt SIMD for CPU/GPU hybrid rendering, color conversion, and 2D geometry primitives to maximize performance.
- Multiversioning is crucial for SIMD to handle different CPU capabilities, with approaches like the 'multiversion' crate and 'pulp' library being explored.
- Safety improvements are in progress, including proposals to make SIMD intrinsics safe under certain conditions and better runtime feature detection.
- Emerging trends like FP16 and AVX-512 are influencing SIMD development, with FP16 offering benefits for pixel values and AVX-512 introducing predication for efficient string operations.
- The 'std::simd' portable SIMD effort is ongoing but may not fully address the need for target-specific optimizations and multiversioning.
- Language evolution proposals aim to enhance Rust's SIMD support, making it safer and more ergonomic for developers.
- The goal is to foster community discussion and development of Rust's SIMD infrastructure to compete with solutions like Highway in C++.