By: Doug S (foo.delete@this.bar.bar), September 24, 2021 2:12 pm
Room: Moderated Discussions
dmcq (dmcq.delete@this.fano.co.uk) on September 24, 2021 1:05 pm wrote:
> SVE is in multiples of 128 bits so not so bad! I' guess the first hetrogenous system with a size greater than
> 128 bits will be an Apple one and I guess they'l go for having the same size in both, perhaps they'll share
> an SVE unit amongst the small cores like ARM. But they haven't even announced a system with SVE yet.
Considering Apple was able to ship millions of ARMv8 CPUs less than a year after ARM released the spec (a FAR more difficult accomplishment than adding SVE) if Apple was going to ship CPUs with SVE they probably would have. SVE was announced as an optional extension to ARMv8.2 over five years ago, and SVE2 over two years ago - they also submitted patches for SVE2 to LLVM in late 2019.
Now it is possible that the ARM Mac effort with M1 and soon Jade-C took up too much engineering bandwidth and they put SVE2 on the back burner, but if they were planning on introducing it at all doing so with the very first ARM Macs (i.e. making that something developers could assume exist in every ARM Mac) would be the most logical course.
That, and their AMX extension, make me think it is increasing unlikely Apple plans to support SVE/SVE2.
> SVE is in multiples of 128 bits so not so bad! I' guess the first hetrogenous system with a size greater than
> 128 bits will be an Apple one and I guess they'l go for having the same size in both, perhaps they'll share
> an SVE unit amongst the small cores like ARM. But they haven't even announced a system with SVE yet.
Considering Apple was able to ship millions of ARMv8 CPUs less than a year after ARM released the spec (a FAR more difficult accomplishment than adding SVE) if Apple was going to ship CPUs with SVE they probably would have. SVE was announced as an optional extension to ARMv8.2 over five years ago, and SVE2 over two years ago - they also submitted patches for SVE2 to LLVM in late 2019.
Now it is possible that the ARM Mac effort with M1 and soon Jade-C took up too much engineering bandwidth and they put SVE2 on the back burner, but if they were planning on introducing it at all doing so with the very first ARM Macs (i.e. making that something developers could assume exist in every ARM Mac) would be the most logical course.
That, and their AMX extension, make me think it is increasing unlikely Apple plans to support SVE/SVE2.