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  • SIMD JavaScript Support Added To Firefox, Under Review For Chrome

    Phoronix: SIMD JavaScript Support Added To Firefox, Under Review For Chrome

    One of Intel's latest open-source adventures has been adding support for SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) instructions to JavaScript...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    So do you need avx / avx 2? or you can get some benefits just with SSE 4.1?

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    • #3
      Originally posted by Sdar View Post
      So do you need avx / avx 2? or you can get some benefits just with SSE 4.1?
      I'm pretty sure you would get most of the benifits just having SSE2, probably even with just MMX you could get somthing out of it.

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      • #4
        Dear Apple,

        Thanks for being such a huge backer of LLVM and creating Clang, for without this investment [and later Google, SONY, Cray, IBM, Intel, etc] these advances don't create Emscripten, and dozens of other recently projects making commercial and foss software that much better.

        Sincerely,

        People not obsessed with FOSS who continue in the face of FOSS self-righteous condesencion to make computing better for everyone.

        P.S. I expect everyone to thank Google for ARM64, LLVM and everything that goes with it for they are so ``Do No Evil'' in today's youth's eyes.

        Where would the world be without Google creating WebKit? Why we better thank KDE because we know Apple owes WebKit to KDE, the same folks who never used WebKit until the entire industry did. /s

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        • #5
          WebKit was actually pretty bad (safari3 would consistantly crash on undo) prior to when Google started contributing. Apple also did a realy bad job of sharing patches with khtml pretty much killing it. Though i will agree that Apple deserves much credit for there part in WebKit's development.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by Marc Driftmeyer View Post
            People not obsessed with FOSS who continue in the face of FOSS self-righteous condesencion to make computing better for everyone.
            Without FOSS this and a lot of other software would not exist.

            Originally posted by Marc Driftmeyer View Post
            P.S. I expect everyone to thank Google for ARM64, LLVM and everything that goes with it for they are so ``Do No Evil'' in today's youth's eyes.
            What? The ARM64 backend is from Apple. The original roots for LLVM were from Chris Lattner and Vikram Adve while at the University of Illinois.


            Originally posted by Marc Driftmeyer View Post
            Where would the world be without Google creating WebKit?
            Google did not create WebKit. Apple did.

            Originally posted by Marc Driftmeyer View Post
            Why we better thank KDE because we know Apple owes WebKit to KDE
            Of course the KDE project deserves some credit. Without KHTML / KJS WebKit would not exist.

            Originally posted by Marc Driftmeyer View Post
            the same folks who never used WebKit until the entire industry did.
            They had no choice but to wait until KDE 5 to switch the default rendering / JavaScript engine as it would have broken backwards compatibility. WebKit was not a 100% compatible drop in replacement for all of the API KHTML / KJS provided.

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            • #7
              Ported from Dart

              This work is a direct port of SIMD types I did for Dart in 2013. Exact same types and operations. If you're interested in seeing what the API looks like, I maintain the ECMAScript proposal as a polyfill library. If you want to experience the full speed of these types today, you can use Dart (the SIMD types are fully accelerated on SSE and NEON in the Dart VM).

              More information:

              Talk I gave last year
              Programming guide

              John McCutchan

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              • #8
                As much as it might improve performance, it feels just so wrong to me that we're at the point in the modern web where we need SIMD instructions. Seriously... if you need that kind of performance client side maybe you shouldn't be writing a web application?

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by Luke_Wolf View Post
                  As much as it might improve performance, it feels just so wrong to me that we're at the point in the modern web where we need SIMD instructions. Seriously... if you need that kind of performance client side maybe you shouldn't be writing a web application?
                  There is no good reason not to improve the performance of JavaScript for apps that can benefit from it such as games, emulators or forms of media processing. You're just being narrow minded.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by brad0 View Post
                    There is no good reason not to improve the performance of JavaScript for apps that can benefit from it such as games, emulators or forms of media processing. You're just being narrow minded.
                    Higher complexity games that need this kind of performance, emulators, and media processing should not be written in javascript. At most you can argue that the game scripts can be written in javascript but even then there's better options. It's the wrong tool for the job. Typescript and friends improve the situation but even then you're still in a horrible situation.

                    Javascript is fine for simple games and things that aren't all that complex, animations, UI stuff, things like that. That said I really don't want to imagine the eye-burning horror that an emulator or encoder written in JS will look like in terms of the codebase.

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