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Scrying the AMD GFX1250 LLVM Tea Leaves

chipsandcheese.com

66 points by mfiguiere · 10 comments

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majke

I'm a heavy user of NVIDIA LOP3 instruction (uint32). I wonder when AMD will finally support it well.

androiddrew

Where does someone start on kernel development for an RDNA4? Books, resources, whatever?

8 year developer just getting into to AI side of the house

WithinReason

...not just implementing barriers in hardware but also full monitors, allowing the wave to be notified if a specific cache line is evicted from the L2 cache.

What is this feature for? When do you need it?

  • averne_

    The explanation is missing that the hardware also notifies you of modifications, which makes it useful for implementing cross-cluster synchronization primitives.

    Compare to MONITOR/MWAIT on x86: https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/mwait#mwait-for-address-ra...

  • dragontamer

    GPUs are absurdly SMT. Like 8 threads or 10 threads (or tracked instruction pointers) per hardware instruction execution unit (for AMD, the Workgroup Processor, WGP)

    I have to imagine that some kind of queue or data structure would benefit from this information. Especially with server GPU tasks staying resident inside of a WGP for literally hours at a time.

    • WithinReason

      sure, but what kind?

      • dragontamer

        wait/arrive seems obvious to me. So I'll talk about that... As a synchronization primitive, its very useful for things like:

            parallel_memset(data, 0); // The 1024 threads go off and, in parallel + some efficient manner, initialize the datastructure
            barrier(); // wait for all 1024 threads to reach here before continuing.
            do_stuff(); // This probably relies on all default data being set before starting
        
        I don't know what a "cluster" is, but its clearly some new subdivision of threads (aside from wavefront, group, block, grid, etc. etc.). Because locking is so inefficient on GPUs, you probably want to use barriers in the typical case.

        Cluster arrive + Cluster wait allow for you to split the barrier into two units. Maybe the first half of a loop must be synchronized, but there's "spare extra work" you can do before calling wait(). This likely makes threading smoother.

            parallel_memset(data, 0); // The 1024 threads go off and, in parallel + some efficient manner, initialize the datastructure
            arrive();
            do_spare_work(); // some extra work before checking for a wait
            wait(); // We ran out of main work + spare work, so now we must fully stop and wait
            do_stuff(); // This probably relies on all default data being set before starting
        
        This is likely more efficient for a number of algorithms than a singular barrier.

        ---------

        As far as the L2 cache thing specifically: I don't know.

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