Visual Instruction Set - Functionality

Functionality

VIS re-uses existing SPARC V9 64-bit floating point registers to hold multiple 8, 16, or 32-bit integer values. In this respect VIS is more similar to the design of MMX than other SIMD architectures such as SSE/SSE2/AltiVec.

VIS includes a number of operations primarily for graphics support, so most of them are only for integers. These include 3D to 2D conversion, edge processing and pixel distance.

There are four ways to use VIS in code:

• The GCC -mvis option
• Use inline assembly
• Use inline template in VSDK, similar to compiler intrinsics, which have C function like interfaces
• Use the mediaLib multimedia library, which has C function interfaces. It uses VIS on SPARC platforms (and MMX/SSE/SSE2 on x86/x64 platforms) to accelerate multimedia application execution