• Timo Rothenpieler's avatar
    avutil/half2float: use native _Float16 if available · ef2c2a22
    Timo Rothenpieler authored
    _Float16 support was available on arm/aarch64 for a while, and with gcc
    12 was enabled on x86 as long as SSE2 is supported.
    
    If the target arch supports f16c, gcc emits fairly efficient assembly,
    taking advantage of it. This is the case on x86-64-v3 or higher.
    Same goes on arm, which has native float16 support.
    On x86, without f16c, it emulates it in software using sse2 instructions.
    
    This has shown to perform rather poorly:
    
    _Float16 full SSE2 emulation:
    frame=50074 fps=848 q=-0.0 size=N/A time=00:33:22.96 bitrate=N/A speed=33.9x
    
    _Float16 f16c accelerated (Zen2, --cpu=znver2):
    frame=50636 fps=1965 q=-0.0 Lsize=N/A time=00:33:45.40 bitrate=N/A speed=78.6x
    
    classic half2float full software implementation:
    frame=49926 fps=1605 q=-0.0 Lsize=N/A time=00:33:17.00 bitrate=N/A speed=64.2x
    
    Hence an additional check was introduced, that only enables use of
    _Float16 on x86 if f16c is being utilized.
    
    On aarch64, a similar uplift in performance is seen:
    
    RPi4 half2float full software implementation:
    frame= 6088 fps=126 q=-0.0 Lsize=N/A time=00:04:03.48 bitrate=N/A speed=5.06x
    
    RPi4 _Float16:
    frame= 6103 fps=158 q=-0.0 Lsize=N/A time=00:04:04.08 bitrate=N/A speed=6.32x
    
    Since arm/aarch64 always natively support 16 bit floats, it can always
    be considered fast there.
    
    I'm not aware of any additional platforms that currently support
    _Float16. And if there are, they should be considered non-fast until
    proven fast.
    ef2c2a22
half2float.h 1.48 KB