Re: add AVX2 support to simd.h

On Tue, Mar 19, 2024 at 11:30 PM Nathan Bossart
<nathandbossart(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> > Sounds similar in principle, but it looks really complicated. I don't
> > think the additional loops and branches are a good way to go, either
> > for readability or for branch prediction. My sketch has one branch for
> > which loop to do, and then performs only one loop. Let's do the
> > simplest thing that could work. (I think we might need a helper
> > function to do the block, but the rest should be easy)
>
> I tried to trim some of the branches, and came up with the attached patch.
> I don't think this is exactly what you were suggesting, but I think it's
> relatively close. My testing showed decent benefits from using 2 vectors
> when there aren't enough elements for 4, so I've tried to keep that part
> intact.

I would caution against that if the benchmark is repeatedly running
against a static number of elements, because the branch predictor will
be right all the time (except maybe when it exits a loop, not sure).
We probably don't need to go to the trouble to construct a benchmark
with some added randomness, but we have be careful not to overfit what
the test is actually measuring.