Arm Limited

Apple Inc.

Nigel John Stephens

Richard Roy Grisenthwaite

Mbou Eyole

David James Seal

Grigorios Magklis

David Hennah Mansell

Neil Burgess

Matthew Lucien Evans

Jelena Milanovic

Alejandro Martinez Vicente

Simon John Craske

Michael John Williams

Lee Evan Eisen

Jacob Eapen

Nathanael Premillieu

Jeffry E Gonion

David Raymond Lutz

Christopher Neal Hinds

Giacomo Gabrielli

Charles E Tucker

Jeffrey E Gonion

Jaime Ferragut Martinez-Vara De Rey

Alex Klaiber

A data transfer instruction is provided which specifies register addressing information for identifying a target portion of the register storage. In response to the data transfer instruction, instruction decoding circuitry controls processing circuitry to perform a data transfer operation to transfer data to or from the target portion of the register storage. The register addressing information includes at least: a base register identifier identifying a base register of the register storage for storing a base value; and an immediate value specified in an encoding of the data transfer instruction, the immediate value representing a value to be added to the base value to provide an index value for selecting the target portion of the register storage. This can be useful to provide an instruction set architecture which supports code that is scalable to variable data structure sizes, and which supports loop unrolling.

Register addressing information for data transfer instruction

Instruction decoder to decode processing instructions; one or more first registers; first processing circuitry to execute the decoded processing instructions in a first processing mode and configured to execute the decoded processing instructions using the one or more first registers; and control circuitry to execute the decoded processing instructions in a second processing mode using one or more second registers; the instruction decoder being configured to decode processing instructions selected from a first instruction set and a second instruction set in the second processing mode, in which one or both of the first and second instruction sets comprises at least one unique instruction set; the instruction decoder configured to decode one or more mode change instructions to change between the first and second processing mode; and the first processing circuitry configured to change the current processing mode between the first and second processing mode responding to executing mode change instruction.

Processing instructions selected from a first instruction set in a first processing mode and instructions selected from a second different instruction set in a second processing mode

An apparatus and a method are provided for performing a splice operation, the apparatus having a set of vector registers and one or more control registers. Processing circuitry is arranged to execute a sequence of instructions including a splice instruction that identifies at least a first vector register and at least one control register. The first vector register stores a first vector of data elements having a vector length, and the at least one control register stores control data identifying one or more data elements occupying sequential data element positions within the first vector of data elements. The processing circuitry is responsive to execution of the splice instruction to extract from the first vector each data element identified by the control data in the at least one control register, and to output the extracted data elements within sequential data element positions of the result vector starting from a first end of the result vector, and data elements from a second vector are output to the remaining result vector data element positions not occupied by the extracted data elements from the first vector.

Apparatus and method for performing a splice of vectors based on location and length data

An apparatus and method of operating an apparatus are provided. The apparatus is responsive to a bit-testing instruction which specifies a source vector register and an index to perform a bit-testing procedure on plural elements stored in the source vector register to generate plural result bits. The bit-testing procedure comprises, for each processed element of the plural elements, setting a respective result bit of the plural result bits in dependence on a value of a tested bit at a bit position in the processed element of the source vector register indicated by the index. This bit-testing instruction thus enables increased performance of program code which is required to perform multiple bit tests and can be suitably formulated into a vectorised form.

Testing bit values inside vector elements

Data processing apparatus comprises vector processing circuitry to selectively apply vector processing operations defined by vector processing instructions to generate one or more data elements of a data vector comprising a plurality of data elements at respective data element positions of the data vector, according to the state of respective predicate flags associated with the positions of the data vector; and generator circuitry to generate instruction sample data indicative of processing activities of the vector processing circuitry for selected ones of the vector processing instructions, instruction sample data indicating at least the state of the predicate flags at execution of the selected vector processing instructions.

Data processing

A data processing apparatus, a method of operating a data processing apparatus, a non-transitory computer readable storage medium, and an instruction are provided. The instruction specifies a first source register, a second source register, and an index. In response to the instruction control signals are generated, causing processing circuitry to perform a data processing operation with respect to each data group in the first source register and the second source register to generate respective result data groups forming a result of the data processing operation. Each of the first source register and the second source register has a size which is an integer multiple at least twice a predefined size of the data group, and each data group comprises a plurality of data elements. The operands of the data processing operation for each data group are a selected data element identified in the data group of the first source register by the index and each data element in the data group of the second source register. A technique for element-by-vector operation which is readily scalable as the register width grows.

Element by vector operations in a data processing apparatus

A data processing systemsupporting vector processing operations uses scaling vector length querying instructions. The scaling vector length querying instructions return a result which is dependent upon a number of elements in a vector for a variable vector element size specified by the instruction and multiplied by a scaling value specified by the instruction. The scaling vector length querying instructions may be in the form of count instructions, increment instructions or decrement instructions. The instructions may include a pattern constraint applying a constraint, such as modulo(M) or power of 2 to the partial result value representing the number of vector elements provided for the register element size specified for the instruction.

Vector length querying instruction

A data processing apparatus is provided comprising: a plurality of storage circuits to store data. Execution circuitry performs one or more operations using the storage circuits in response to instructions. The instructions include a relinquish instruction. The execution circuitry responds to the relinquish instruction by indicating that at least one of the plurality of storage circuits is an unused storage circuit and the execution circuitry affects execution of future instructions based on the unused storage circuit after executing the relinquish instruction.

Data structure relinquishing

Vector add-with-carry instructions are described which use some elements of a destination vector register, or corresponding fields of a predicate register, to provide the carry information corresponding to results of an add-with-carry operation. This is useful for accelerating computations involving multiplications of long integer values.

Vector add-with-carry instruction

Vector interleaving techniques in a data processing apparatus are disclosed, comprising apparatuses, instructions, methods of operating the apparatuses, and simulator implementations. A vector interleaving instruction specifies a first source register, second source register, and destination register. A first set of input data items is retrieved from the first source register and a second set of input data items from the second source register. A data processing operation is performed on selected input data item pairs taken from the first and second set of input data items to generate a set of result data items, which are stored as a result data vector in the destination register. First source register dependent result data items are stored in a first set of alternating positions in the destination data vector and second source register dependent result data items are stored in a second set of alternating positions in the destination data vector.

Vector interleaving in a data processing apparatus

Data processing apparatus comprises processing circuitry to apply processing operations to one or more data items of a linear array comprising a plurality, n, of data items at respective positions in the linear array, the processing circuitry being configured to access an array of n&#xd7;n storage locations, where n is an integer greater than one, the processing circuitry comprising: instruction decoder circuitry to decode program instructions; and instruction processing circuitry to execute instructions decoded by the instruction decoder circuitry; wherein the instruction decoder circuitry is responsive to an array access instruction, to control the instruction processing circuitry to access, as a linear array, a set of n storage locations arranged in an array direction selected, under control of the array access instruction, from a set of candidate array directions comprising at least a first array direction and a second array direction different to the first array direction.

An apparatus comprises: an instruction decoder and processing circuitry. In response to a data structure processing instruction specifying at least one input data structure identifier and an output data structure identifier, the instruction decoder controls the processing circuitry to perform a processing operation on at least one input data structure to generate an output data structure. Each input/output data structure comprises an arrangement of data corresponding to a plurality of memory addresses. The apparatus comprises two or more sets of one or more data structure metadata registers, each set associated with a corresponding data structure identifier and designated to store address-indicating metadata for identifying the memory addresses for the data structure identified by the corresponding data structure identifier.

Data structure processing

Data processing apparatus comprises processing circuitry to selectively apply a vector processing operation to data items at positions within data vectors according to the states of a set of respective predicate flags associated with the positions, the data vectors having a data vector processing order, each data vector comprising a plurality of data items having a data item order, the processing circuitry comprising: instruction decoder circuitry to decode program instructions; and instruction processing circuitry to execute instructions decoded by the instruction decoder circuitry; wherein the instruction decoder circuitry is responsive to a propagation instruction to control the instruction processing circuitry to derive a set of predicate flags applicable to a current data vector in dependence upon a set of predicate flags applicable to a preceding data vector in the data vector processing order, wherein when one or more last-most predicate flags of the set applicable to the preceding data vector are inactive, all of the derived predicate flags in the set applicable to the current data vector are inactive.

Propagation instruction to generate a set of predicate flags based on previous and current prediction data

A data processing system () supports vector processing operations performed upon vector operands comprising a plurality of vector operand elements. The data processing system includes a processor () having an instruction decoder () which decodes mixed-element-sized vector arithmetic instructions to generate control signals () which control processing circuitry () to perform arithmetic operations upon a first vector of first source operand elements aof a first bit size A, and a second vector of second source operand elements bof a second bit size B. The second bit size B is greater than the first bit size A.

Vector arithmetic and logical instructions performing operations on different first and second data element widths from corresponding first and second vector registers

A vector data transfer instruction is provided for triggering a data transfer between storage locations corresponding to a contiguous block of addresses and multiple data elements of at least one vector register. The instruction specifies a start address of the contiguous block using a base register and an immediate offset value specifies as a multiple of the size of the contiguous block of addresses. This is useful for loop unrolling which can help to improve performance of vectorised code by combining multiple iterations of a loop into a single iteration of an unrolled loop, to reduce the loop control overhead.

Growing community of inventors

Cambridge, United Kingdom

Nigel John Stephens