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Lecture26-27
SIMD Architecture
Array processors
Vector processors
Cray X1
Multimedia extensions
Vector computers usually have vector registers which can store each 64
up to 128 words.
They are SISD processors with vector instructions executed on pipelined functional
units.
Vector registers:
vector registers.
mask register M: stores a set of l bits, one for each
element in a vector, interpreted as Boolean values;
Advantages
Multi-bit processors
ILLIAC IV (64-bit), MasPar MP-1 (32-bit)
Processor-memory interconnection
Dedicated memory organization
ILLIAC IV, CM-2, MP-1
To compute
Assuming:
A dedicated memory organization.
Elements of A and B are properly and perfectly distributed
among processors (the compiler can help here).
We have:
The product terms are generated in parallel.
Additions can be performed in log2N iterations.
Video and audio applications very often deal with large arrays of small
data types (8 or 16 bits).
Solutions:
Computer-aided design
Internet application
Computer visualization
Video games
Speech recognition
Both vector and array processors are specialized for numerical problems
expressed in matrix or vector formats.
The instruction set of modern microprocessors has been extended to support SIMDstyle parallelism with operations on short vectors.