Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2024 11:41:53 -0500
From: Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: "Amonson, Paul D" <paul.d.amonson@intel.com>,
	David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com>,
	Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>,
	Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>,
	"Shankaran, Akash" <akash.shankaran@intel.com>,
	Noah Misch <noah@leadboat.com>,
	Matthias van de Meent <boekewurm+postgres@gmail.com>,
	"pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org" <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: Popcount optimization using AVX512
Message-ID: <20240329164153.GC1106154@nathanxps13>
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On Fri, Mar 29, 2024 at 12:30:14PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com> writes:
>>> I see google web references to the xgetbv instruction as far back as 2009
>>> for Intel 64 bit HW and 2010 for AMD 64bit HW, maybe you could test for
>>> _xgetbv() MSVC built-in. How far back do you need to go?
> 
>> Hm.  It seems unlikely that a compiler would understand AVX512 intrinsics
>> and not XGETBV then.  I guess the other question is whether CPUID
>> indicating AVX512 is enabled implies the availability of XGETBV on the CPU.
>> If that's not safe, we might need to add another CPUID test.
> 
> Some quick googling says that (1) XGETBV predates AVX and (2) if you
> are worried about old CPUs, you should check CPUID to verify whether
> XGETBV exists before trying to use it.  I did not look for the
> bit-level details on how to do that.

That extra CPUID check should translate to exactly one additional line of
code, so I think I'm inclined to just add it.

-- 
Nathan Bossart
Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com