Miguel de Icaza's blog - Latest Comments in Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

migueldeicaza — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 11:08:38 -0000

A few attempts have been done.

Look for the Brahma project, and the LINQ to GPU.

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

Isaacschnippelson — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 01:48:23 -0000

i don't know if it was discussed or propposed but I once had an idea of writing shaders directly in C#/mono. We compile it as it were a usual C# function and then during startup we invoke CECIL or similar and translate the bytecode into the output shader program (glsl or hlsl). Translation is very straightford & simple.
I had a working prototype but i'm not that into shaders so it've remained a prototype unfortunately.
Just wanted to share an idea of how mono could be useful.

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

Timwi — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 12:03:50 -0000

The method signature given as

Vector4f static operator + (Vector3f a, Vector3f b)

should be

Vector4f static operator + (Vector4f a, Vector4f b)

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

migueldeicaza — Fri, 22 May 2009 14:09:59 -0000

The good news is: we are taking patches.

Please design the feature, code it, and post it to the mailing list, we will be happy to review it/integrate it.

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

Medyum — Fri, 22 May 2009 07:12:55 -0000

Yikes! I support the idea, but it makes one somewhat dependent on using Mono's vector structures instead of one's own. I'd like to see an attribute that can be applied to custom vector op methods, and let the Mono JIT check that there's a vector op going on, and optimize that with SIMD.

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

Medyum — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 04:37:56 -0000

Great news! We are already evaluating how OpenTK can best advantage of Mono

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

Medyum — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 04:37:26 -0000

These are *great* news!

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

Medyum — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 04:36:45 -0000

You can either use our mailing lists, our irc chat bots or just email me....

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

GeneticGenesis — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:41:34 -0000

It might be worth taking a look here: http://ds9a.nl/gcc-simd/exa... and compiling your code for your chipset, and seeing how fast you can get it down to in C++.

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

Frank Großmann — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 04:05:44 -0000

Hello!

Why are the Vector structs are not Serializeable?
(I've tried to write a dotNet to Mono Runtime Bridge using .Net Remoting, which is working but I cant use e.g. Vector2d directly)

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

Vladimir Vukicevic — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 07:16:20 -0000

Hey Miguel, this is pretty cool -- I was talking about doing the same thing for JS with Tracemonkey, and someone pointed me to this. It's a great way to expose some simd stuff direct to developers without asking them to play auto-vectorization roulette :-)

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

marwee — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 03:32:37 -0000

It is a pity that the Simd-Types are not serializable. Besides this i love it.

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

Mp3 indir — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 08:07:25 -0000

Briefly speaking, I could win 100% of speed for mono with -O=

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

radioman — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 07:25:37 -0000

nice ;}

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

drac — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 05:21:13 -0000

The C++ program was compiled in Debug Mode. It's not a fair comparison. Here is a benchmark on Windows XP with C++ program compiled with MinGW 4.3.2 and Visual Studio 2005.
http://cristianadam.blogspo...

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

migueldeicaza — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 04:38:53 -0000

Some will, some will not.

The best thing is to discuss this on the mailing list or check our SVN release.

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

Anton — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 22:19:13 -0000

Hello, Miguel.

I am very interested in suggested SIMD support and just finished speed measurments in my particular environment: SuSE 11 running in VurtualBox 2.1. Detailed description of my results is in the following post: http://kyta.spb.ru/monosimd...

Briefly speaking, I could win 100% of speed for mono with -O=simd switch, and at the same time I could loose 50% of speed for mono with -O=-simd switch.

That is not what I expected from your presentation, but 100% are still 100%... The other point is VirtualMachine environment. I think this could break everything. I will try to execute this snippet in "real" environment asap.

Best Regards,
Anton.

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

Anton — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 07:03:41 -0000

I have a lot of logarithm/exponent calls. Will Mono.Simd optimise them?

Do you plan to rewrite advanced functions with SIMD support? Ln, Exp, Sqrt, Pow just to mention some of them...

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

Mungolf — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:02:10 -0000

So why does the figure say "C++ (3D doubles) ?

And why do you use a for-loop to compute the sum of two vectors? The compiler better has a good loop-unroll functionality because otherwise it makes the comparison even more meaningless.

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

Mungolf — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:01:46 -0000

Anyway, nice job on the mono part

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

Yoav HaCohen — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 06:05:07 -0000

I think that a standard implementation of BLAS for standard Mono/.NET arrays will be a very useful.

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

Itai Bar-Haim — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 07:34:45 -0000

What about some more general functions, that can perform operations on any two primitives arrays of the same type and size? This will save the repeated coding task of finding the best combination of SIMD operations, corner cases, etc, and will greatly help to code filters (say, the very commonly used median filter).

Itai.

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

Quack quack — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 08:48:57 -0000

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

migueldeicaza — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:57:57 -0000

yes, the code is available from trunk, from the mono-2-2 branch and from the Mono 2.2 preview packages that we shipped a week or two ago.

When we showed the code at the PDC the code was already live, and the performance tests were all done with the code that was available at the time on SVN. We just did not go out of our way to advertise it.

Notice that improvements to the API and to the JIT code since the PDC have improved Mono's performance on these tests.

Re: Mono's SIMD Support: Making Mono safe for Gaming - Miguel de Icaza

migueldeicaza — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:56:30 -0000

All of the information is in the source code, it contains makefiles and invocation parameters.

The source code for C# is just a straight forward port with no tuning or performance improvements attempted. It could also be tuned up and improved (for example, using unsafe code would boost its performance).

As I mentioned in the talk and elsewhere, C++ SIMD intrinsics would give you a major boost over plain C++ just like it did for Mono. But our research direction was on improving Mono to the point that it would satisfy the needs of game developers that would like the safety and productivity of a managed language without having to pay the high price of going to C++.