practice

Doi: 10.1145/1924421.1924437

Article development led by queue.acm.org

Exposing SIMD units within interpreted
languages could simplify programs and
unleash floods of untapped processor power.
By Jonathan PaRRi, DanieL shaPiRo,
mioDRaG BoLiC, anD VoiCu GRoza
Returning
Control to the
Programmer:
simD
intrinsics
for Virtual
machines

SERVER And woRKSTATIon hardware architecture is
continually improving, yet interpreted languages—
most importantly, Java—have failed to keep pace with
the proper utilization of modern processors. SIMD
(single instruction, multiple data) units are available

in nearly every current desktop and server processor and are greatly underutilized, especially with interpreted languages. If multicore processors continue their current growth pattern, interpreted-language performance will begin to fall behind, since current native compilers and languages offer better automated SIMD optimization and direct SIMD mapping support. As each core in commercial x86 multicore processors includes a dedicated SIMD unit, the performance disparity will grow exponentially as long as the available SIMD units remain underutilized in interpreted-language environments.

Software design and computer architecture have seen the evolution of parallel data processing, but it has not been fully utilized within the interpreted-language domain. Taking full ad-