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ssesimdlogarithmnatural-logarithm

Logarithm with SSE, or switch to FPU?

I'm doing some statistics calculations. I need them to be fast, so I rewrote most of it to use SSE. I'm pretty much new to it, so I was wondering what the right approach here is:

To my knowledge, there is no log2 or ln function in SSE, at least not up to 4.1, which is the latest version supported by the hardware I use.

Is it better to:

  1. extract 4 floats, and do FPU calculations on them to determine enthropy - I won't need to load any of those values back into SSE registers, just sum them up to another float
  2. find a function for SSE that does log2
Solution

  • There seem to be a few SSE log2 implementations around, e.g. this one.

    There is also the Intel Approximate Maths Library which has a log2 function among others - it's old (2000) but it's SSE2 and it should still work reasonably well.

    See also: