Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR PARTIAL WAVEFRONT MERGER

Abstract:

A method and system for partial wavefront merger is described. Vector processing machines employ the partial wavefront merger to merge partial wavefronts into one or more wavefronts. The system includes a partial wavefront manager and unified registers. The partial wavefront manager detects wavefronts in different single-instruction-multiple-data ("SIMD") units which contain inactive work items and active work items (hereinafter referred to as "partial wavefronts"), moves the partial wavefronts into one or more SIMD unit(s) and merges the partial wavefronts into one or more wavefront(s). The unified register allows each active work item in the one or more merged wavefront(s) to access the previously allocated registers in the originating SIMD units. Consequently, the contents of the unified registers do not have to be copied to the SIMD unit(s) executing the one or merged wavefront(s).