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

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 ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: VLSISP
• Authors: Yedidya Hilewitz, Ruby B. Lee
• Keywords: Bit Manipulation Operations, Butterfly, Parallel Extract, VLSISP 2008