On 29/05/2013 15:00, Nasos Iliopoulos wrote:
As a matter of fact I am surprised by the progress of the compilers auto-vectorization facilities the last few years, that make me -doubt- the need for explicit vectorization any more. The GSOC project will make it clear for us. An added benefit on relying on compiler is that future vector instructions come for free. A disadvantage is of course the non-guarantee that auto-vectorization will work but I find this rarely the case.
I beg to differ, you're in for some nasty surprises. It basically works for simple operations on simple one-level loops with easily inferred loop boundaries. Also, those stuff are very fragile and based on vendor willingness to do whatever. In multiple actual cases we had to deal with in both academic and industrial context, the autovectorizer was rapidly confused even for rather simple c++ code.