On Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 3:30 PM Uros Bizjak <ubiz...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 9:09 AM Liu, Hongtao <hongtao....@intel.com> wrote: > > > > Hi : > > This patch is about to enable support for bfloat16 which will be in > > Future Cooper Lake, Please refer to > > https://software.intel.com/en-us/download/intel-architecture-instruction-set-extensions-programming-reference > > for more details about BF16. > > > > There are 3 instructions for AVX512BF16: VCVTNE2PS2BF16, VCVTNEPS2BF16 and > > DPBF16PS instructions, which are Vector Neural Network Instructions > > supporting: > > > > - VCVTNE2PS2BF16: Convert Two Packed Single Data to One Packed BF16 > > Data. > > - VCVTNEPS2BF16: Convert Packed Single Data to Packed BF16 Data. > > - VDPBF16PS: Dot Product of BF16 Pairs Accumulated into Packed Single > > Precision. > > > > Since only BF16 intrinsics are supported, we treat it as HI for simplicity. > > I think it was a mistake declaring cvtps2ph and cvtph2ps using HImode > instead of HFmode. Is there a compelling reason not to introduce > corresponding bf16_format supporting infrastructure and declare these > intrinsics using half-binary (HBmode ?) mode instead? > > Uros.
Bfloat16 isn't IEEE standard which we want to reserve HFmode for. The IEEE 754 standard specifies a binary16 as having the following format: Sign bit: 1 bit Exponent width: 5 bits Significand precision: 11 bits (10 explicitly stored) Bfloat16 has the following format: Sign bit: 1 bit Exponent width: 8 bits Significand precision: 8 bits (7 explicitly stored), as opposed to 24 bits in a classical single-precision floating-point format -- BR, Hongtao
