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Fast Bit Gather, Bit Scatter and Bit Permutation Instructions for Commodity Microprocessors

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Abstract

Advanced bit manipulation operations are not efficiently supported by commodity word-oriented microprocessors. Programming tricks are typically devised to shorten the long sequence of instructions needed to emulate these complicated bit operations. As these bit manipulation operations are relevant to applications that are becoming increasingly important, we propose direct support for them in microprocessors. In particular, we propose fast bit gather (or parallel extract), bit scatter (or parallel deposit) and bit permutation instructions (including group, butterfly and inverse butterfly). We show that all these instructions can be implemented efficiently using both the fast butterfly and inverse butterfly network datapaths. Specifically, we show that parallel deposit can be mapped onto a butterfly circuit and parallel extract can be mapped onto an inverse butterfly circuit. We define static, dynamic and loop invariant versions of the instructions, with static versions utilizing a much simpler functional unit. We show how a hardware decoder can be implemented for the dynamic and loop-invariant versions to generate, dynamically, the control signals for the butterfly and inverse butterfly datapaths. The simplest functional unit we propose is smaller and faster than an ALU. We also show that these instructions yield significant speedups over a basic RISC architecture for a variety of different application kernels taken from applications domains including bioinformatics, steganography, coding, compression and random number generation.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the Department of Defense and a research gift from Intel Corporation. Hilewitz is also supported by a Hertz Foundation Graduate Fellowship and an NSF Graduate Fellowship. The authors would also like to thank Roger Golliver of Intel Corporation for suggesting some applications that might benefit from bit manipulation instructions.

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  1. Princeton Architecture Laboratory for Multimedia and Security (PALMS), Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA

    Yedidya Hilewitz & Ruby B. Lee

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  1. Yedidya Hilewitz
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  2. Ruby B. Lee
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Correspondence to Ruby B. Lee.

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Hilewitz, Y., Lee, R.B. Fast Bit Gather, Bit Scatter and Bit Permutation Instructions for Commodity Microprocessors. J Sign Process Syst Sign Image Video Technol 53, 145–169 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-008-0212-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-008-0212-8

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