INSTRUCTION AND LOGIC TO PROVIDE VECTOR SCATTER OPERATION FUNCTIONALITY AND VECTOR GATHER OPERATION FUNCTIONALITY

摘要

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide vector scatter operation functionality and/or vector gather operation functionality.SOLUTION: In response to an instruction specifying a gather operation, a destination register, an operand register and a memory address, execution units read values in a mask register, where fields in the mask register correspond to offset indices in an index register for data elements in memory. A first mask value indicates that the element has not been gathered from the memory, and a second value indicates that the element does not need to be, or has already been gathered. Each data element having the first value is gathered from the memory into a destination register location, and a value in the mask register is changed to the second value. When all mask register fields have the second value, a second operation is performed using data in the destination and operand registers.SELECTED DRAWING: Figure 14