[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH v2 0/1] lavc/aarch64: add some neon pix_abs functions

[Swinney, Jonathan]

Thanks Martin for the review. I made some updates according to the suggestions you made.

I added a checkasm function, but I'm new to the test framework, so it may need some work still.

> Would it be beneficial to not do the addv here on each iteration, but 
> accumulate in v18.8h, and the just do one single addv at the end?

I did some testing with this, and it is, indeed, faster, however the problem I ran into is that the bounds for the loop can be higher than the capacity of a 16-bit unsigned integer used for accumulating in v16.8h. With the addv inside the loop, this register can hold the maximum possible value without overflowing before we increase the width of the field with the add instruction. If you have a trick or there are restrictions on the inputs that I am not aware of, let me know.

> This version most certainly would be slower indeed. If we could be ok with 
> doing a bit of overread, the simplest version might be to load e.g. "ld1 
> {v4.16b, v5.16b}, [x2]" followed by "ext v5.16b, v4.16b, v5.16b, #1" to 
> shift it. But doing an overlapping unaligned load probably is fine too.

I experimented with these instructions and found that it was marginally faster on Graviton 2, but it was slower on Graviton 3. Graviton 3 has more vector pipelines than Graviton 2 and is therefore a better candidate for video encoding workloads, so I chose to prefer Graviton 3. I didn't test it other chips.

Thank you for reviewing the patch!

Jonathan Swinney