[OpenJDK 2D-Dev] OpenJDK: SIMD and 3DNOW

[Chris Campbell]

Alexander,

The HotSpot VM takes advantage of SIMD instruction sets (e.g. VIS on  
SPARC processors, MMX/SSE2 on Intel/AMD processors) to accelerate  
certain common calls, such as various methods in the java.lang.Math  
class for example.  Also, Java2D takes advantage of SIMD instructions  
in certain cases.  But these are really just implementation details;  
it doesn't mean there are any public APIs in the JDK or elsewhere  
that provide an abstraction layer over e.g. SSE2, which I think is  
what you're seeking.  In other words, the answer is "no".

If you really want to leverage native SIMD instructions, you're free  
to write your own JNI code, but just keep in mind that you'd better  
have a lot of data to process, otherwise the cost of making JNI calls  
will outweigh any benefits you get from native SIMD instructions.

Chris


On Aug 24, 2007, at 1:03 PM, alexanderschunk at t-online.de wrote:
> Hi,
>
> i am currently working on a linear Algebra API called LinAlg and  
> looking for SIMD and or 3DNOW extensions to speed up operations in  
> particular Vector and Matrix operations.
>
> I wonder if there is SIMD and or 3DNOW support in Java 6 or OpenJDK.
>
> I have worked with SIMD and 3DNOW with C++ on some 3D Graphics APIs  
> for DirectX.
>
> - Alex