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authorGravatar Gael Guennebaud <g.gael@free.fr>2013-01-06 23:57:54 +0100
committerGravatar Gael Guennebaud <g.gael@free.fr>2013-01-06 23:57:54 +0100
commit2abe7d8c6e11a02fc345f6ae464b4b759b092a67 (patch)
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+namespace Eigen {
+
+/** \eigenManualPage TopicFixedSizeVectorizable Fixed-size vectorizable Eigen objects
+
+The goal of this page is to explain what we mean by "fixed-size vectorizable".
+
+\section summary Executive Summary
+
+An Eigen object is called "fixed-size vectorizable" if it has fixed size and that size is a multiple of 16 bytes.
+
+Examples include:
+\li Eigen::Vector2d
+\li Eigen::Vector4d
+\li Eigen::Vector4f
+\li Eigen::Matrix2d
+\li Eigen::Matrix2f
+\li Eigen::Matrix4d
+\li Eigen::Matrix4f
+\li Eigen::Affine3d
+\li Eigen::Affine3f
+\li Eigen::Quaterniond
+\li Eigen::Quaternionf
+
+\section explanation Explanation
+
+First, "fixed-size" should be clear: an Eigen object has fixed size if its number of rows and its number of columns are fixed at compile-time. So for example Matrix3f has fixed size, but MatrixXf doesn't (the opposite of fixed-size is dynamic-size).
+
+The array of coefficients of a fixed-size Eigen object is a plain "static array", it is not dynamically allocated. For example, the data behind a Matrix4f is just a "float array[16]".
+
+Fixed-size objects are typically very small, which means that we want to handle them with zero runtime overhead -- both in terms of memory usage and of speed.
+
+Now, vectorization (both SSE and AltiVec) works with 128-bit packets. Moreover, for performance reasons, these packets need to be have 128-bit alignment.
+
+So it turns out that the only way that fixed-size Eigen objects can be vectorized, is if their size is a multiple of 128 bits, or 16 bytes. Eigen will then request 16-byte alignment for these objects, and henceforth rely on these objects being aligned so no runtime check for alignment is performed.
+
+*/
+
+}