VectorAPI min and max intrinsics

[John Rose]

On Apr 18, 2018, at 1:25 PM, Paul Sandoz <paul.sandoz at oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> Thanks that is much clearer now. Basically the semantics are the same as the Java < and > operations, which is great. I was concerned there was some deviation, adding a third variant.

One way to raise this issue is to insist that the non-intrinsified
behavior of the vector be identical to the intrinsified one.

Which suggests to me that we should be sure to run all of
our test cases with intrinsics turned off, as well as on, as a
way of catching divergent behavior (when it is unexpected).

It also suggests that when questions arises with corner cases
(as with signed zero and NaN) that we should be extra careful
to make sure there are unit tests which exercise those corner
cases.  If we have such tests, and if we run them with and
without intrinsics, we can be pretty confident that the vector
hardware isn't doing something different from what the reference
Java code does.

— John