Question

I’m doing some statistics calculations. I need them to be fast, so I rewrote most of it to use SSE. I’m pretty much new to it, so I was wondering what the right approach here is:

To my knowledge, there is no log2 or ln function in SSE, at least not up to 4.1, which is the latest version supported by the hardware I use.

Is it better to:

1. extract 4 floats, and do FPU calculations on them to determine enthropy – I won’t need to load any of those values back into SSE registers, just sum them up to another float
2. find a function for SSE that does log2

Answer 1

There seem to be a few SSE log2 implementations around, e.g. this one.

There is also the Intel Approximate Maths Library which has a log2 function among others – it’s old (2000) but it’s SSE2 and it should still work reasonably well.

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See also:

• sse_mathfun – SSE vector math library
• avx_mathfun – AVX vector math library
• libmvec – vector math library added in glibc 2.22