About SIMD.info

The Goal

With 20 years of SIMD programming experience, we can say that the hardest problem when porting SIMD code from one architecture to another is the lack of comprehensive mappings between each architecture. Some vendors provide their own intrinsic online reference guides, but others don't. For those that don't, the SIMD developer usually has to study these lengthy ISA reference manuals that span thousands of pages. Even the most experienced developer has spent at least a few hours reading those, trying to find and understand just one elusive instruction. But that is the case even if there is an online reference, as the developer would have to compare those intrinsics/instructions and find ways to emulate instructions if there are no exact equivalents.

There had to be a better way, and now there is. After many years of work, quite a few rewrites, and refactorings, we believe that SIMD.info is now in a state that is presentable, though not 100% complete. However, it is functioning and can already be helpful to SIMD developers.

SIMD.info provides a knowledge base of all.

We would like to thank Theodore Karkoulis for the initial implementation of the frontend and backend.

History of SIMD.info

The idea for SIMD.info started originally as a book: SIMD Engines Comparative Reference. The campaign was not successful and after a while, it was soon proven that the book format was going to be impossible to manage as it would require thousands of pages to cover every instruction, intrinsic in all the current SIMD engines.

So, the decision to move it online was made and SIMD.info was created.

Here I would like to thank the following persons for their contributions to that campaign. It might have failed, but I never forgot their help:

• Arm (Yes, Arm)
• Zygmunt Krynicki
• Sune Vuorela
• Riku Voipio
• Chryssa Gikopoulou
• Steve McIntyre
• 'Aardvark' (sorry I don't have the name)
• Steev Klimaszewski
• Kolja Brix
• Martin Decky
• Maksim Lin
• wrsmith
• Christian Gmeiner
• Mathias Parnaudeau

In this way, I want to express my gratitude to those few that decided to support such a difficult task. One of the reasons I wanted to complete SIMD.info was to show them that their contribution, however small, was not in vain.

Konstantinos Margaritis
CTO, VectorCamp