Fast, parallel applications with WebAssembly SIMD · V8

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2021-06-26 19:00:03

SIMD stands for Single Instruction, Multiple Data. SIMD instructions are a special class of instructions that exploit data parallelism in applications by simultaneously performing the same operation on multiple data elements. Compute intensive applications like audio/video codecs, image processors, are all examples of applications that take advantage of SIMD instructions to accelerate performance. Most modern architectures support some variants of SIMD instructions.

The WebAssembly SIMD proposal defines a portable, performant subset of SIMD operations that are available across most modern architectures. This proposal derived many elements from the SIMD.js proposal, which in turn was originally derived from the Dart SIMD specification. The SIMD.js proposal was an API proposed at TC39 with new types and functions for performing SIMD computations, but this was archived in favor of supporting SIMD operations more transparently in WebAssembly. The WebAssembly SIMD proposal was introduced as a way for browsers to take advantage of the data level parallelism using the underlying hardware.WebAssembly SIMD proposal #

The high-level goal of the WebAssembly SIMD proposal is to introduce vector operations to the WebAssembly Specification, in a way that guarantees portable performance.