A major new version of ISPC with several new targets and important bug fixes.
Here's a list of the most important changes, if you are using pre-built
binaries (which are based on patched version of LLVM 3.3):
-
The naming of targets was changed to explicitly include data type width and
a number of threads in the gang. For example,avx2-i32x8is AVX2 target,
which uses 32 bit types as a base and has 8 threads in a gang. Old naming
scheme is still supported, but depricated. -
New SSE4 targets for calculations based on 8 bit and 16 bit data types:
sse4-i8x16andsse4-i16x8. -
New AVX1 target for calculations based on 64 bit data types:
avx1-i64x4. -
SVML support was extended and improved.
-
Behavior of
-gswitch was changed to not affect optimization level. -
ISPC debug infrastructure was redesigned. See
--help-devfor more info and
enjoy capabilities of new--debug-phase=<value>and--off-phase=<value>
switches. -
Fixed an auto-dispatch bug, which caused AVX code execution when OS doesn't
support AVX (but hardware does). -
Fixed a bug, which discarded uniform/varying keyword in typedefs.
-
Several performance regressions were fixed.
If you are building ISPC yourself, then following changes are also available
to you:
-
--cpu=slmfor targeting Intel Atom codename Silvermont (if LLVM 3.4 is used). -
ARM NEON targets are available (if enabled in build system).
-
--debug-ir=<value>is available to generate debug information based on LLVM
IR (if LLVM 3.4 is used). In debugger you'll see LLVM IR instead of source
code. -
A redesigned and improved test and configuration management system is
available to facilitate the process of building LLVM and testing ISPC
compiler.
Standard library changes/fixes:
-
__pause()function was removed from standard library. -
Fixed
reduce_[min|max]_[float|double]intrinsics, which were producing
incorrect code under some conditions.
Language changes:
- By default a floating point constant without a suffix is a single precision
constant (32 bit). A new suffix "d" was introduced to allow double precision
constant (64 bit). Please refer totests/double-consts.ispcfor syntax
examples.