Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2024 16:31:40 -0500
From: Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>
To: Ants Aasma <ants.aasma@cybertec.at>
Cc: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>,
	"Amonson, Paul D" <paul.d.amonson@intel.com>,
	Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com>,
	Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>,
	"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
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On Tue, Apr 02, 2024 at 12:11:59AM +0300, Ants Aasma wrote:
> What about using the masking capabilities of AVX-512 to handle the
> tail in the same code path? Masked out portions of a load instruction
> will not generate an exception. To allow byte level granularity
> masking, -mavx512bw is needed. Based on wikipedia this will only
> disable this fast path on Knights Mill (Xeon Phi), in all other cases
> VPOPCNTQ implies availability of BW.

Sounds promising.  IMHO we should really be sure that these kinds of loads
won't generate segfaults and the like due to the masked-out portions.  I
searched around a little bit but haven't found anything that seemed
definitive.

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