Question

I need to do an arbitrary reorder of a 7 bit value (Yes I know I should be using a table) and am wondering if there are any bit hacks to do this.

Example:

// <b0, b1, b2, b3, b4, b5, b6> -> <b3, b2, b4, b1, b5, b0, b6>  // the naive way out =    (0x020 & In) << 5 |    (0x008 & In) << 2 |    (0x040 & In)      |    (0x012 & In) >> 1 |    (0x004 & In) >> 2 |    (0x001 & In) >> 3;  // 6 ANDs, 5 ORs, 5 shifts = 16 ops 

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edit: I was thinking of something along the lines of this

Just for kicks and because I was AFTK I’m trying a brute force search for solutions of the form:

((In * C1) >> C2) & 0x7f 

No solutions found.

Answer 1

Have a look at the compiler output of your ‘naive’ code, it might surprise you. I once did something like that and the compiler (VC++2005) completely changed the values of all the ands and shifts for me to make them more efficient, eg I’m sure it would remove your ‘(0x001 & In) >> 3’.

But yes, if the reshuffle is a fixed function then a table is probably best.

Update

For a laugh I looked at the compiler output from VC++ 2005….

First I tried a constant value for ‘In’ but the compiler wasn’t fooled one bit, it produced this code:

mov eax,469h 

ie. it completely optimized it away.

So … I tried a proper input and got this:

00401D4F  mov         eax,ecx  00401D51  and         eax,20h  00401D54  shl         eax,3  00401D57  mov         edx,ecx  00401D59  and         edx,8  00401D5C  or          eax,edx  00401D5E  mov         edx,ecx  00401D60  sar         edx,1  00401D62  and         edx,2  00401D65  or          edx,ecx  00401D67  sar         edx,1  00401D69  shl         eax,2  00401D6C  and         edx,9  00401D6F  or          eax,edx  00401D71  and         ecx,40h  00401D74  or          eax,ecx  

That’s four shift operations, five ANDs, four ORs – not bad for six inputs. Probably better than most people could do by hand.

It’s probably also optimized for out-of-order execution so it’ll be less clock cycles than it seems. 🙂