Bounty #1: use altivec to optimize the file x265/source/common/ipfilter.cpp

[Former user]

As a following action of ticket 137 (https://bitbucket.org/multicoreware/x265/issue/137/add-power-altivec-support-to-x265), there will be 3 bounties opened soon on bounty source to promote the altivec support in x265: https://www.bountysource.com/teams/ibm/bounties

Here is the summary of the first bounty: Use GCC altivec intrincics (https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/PowerPC-AltiVec_002fVSX-Built-in-Functions.html#PowerPC-AltiVec_002fVSX-Built-in-Functions) to optimize all of the functions in the x265/source/common/ipfilter.cpp. The result should be merged back to x265 open source software (http://x265.org/developers/). Estimated Price: 550USD

[Tom Vaughan]

Hi Rong - I'm the VP of Products for MulticoreWare (developers of x265). Although PowerPC is not one of the hardware architectures officially supported by x265, MulticoreWare has strong experience with the PowerPC platform. If there is enough demand, and commercial funding to support this, MulticoreWare could add support for the PowerPC platform. Can you contact me at tom.vaughan @ multicorewareinc dot com to help me understand your use case, and what you need?

[David Edelsohn]

Any developer who needs an account on one of the IBM Power developer systems can list me, David, or Rong as the sponsor / advocate.

[Former user]

Devdan, For you questions: 1. Do you have a link to a set of tests that we can run to compare the performance of the x265 encoder with and without altivec intrinsics? This would validate our changes as enhancements. -> I think the performance you mentioned here is encoding speed, right? We usually use HM (svn://hevc.kw.bbc.co.uk/svn/jctvc-hm/tags/HM-16.7) or FFmpeg fate-suite (https://ffmpeg.org/download.html) to test our code, and use linux perf tools to profile it to see the improvement. If you want to discuss the details, you can send email to me. 2. The request form for access to the POWER Cloud at OSU has a required line item that asks for our 'IBM Linux Technology Center Advocate'. Whom should we specify as that advocate? Thanks. ->As David suggest, you can list David or me as the advocate.

[Former user]

Patch has been sent to [e-mail]. You have to be a subscriber to that list in order to view the patch details. If you are, below is the patch header to help in searching for it. # HG changeset patch # User Dan Parrot [e-mail] # Date 1457162331 0 # Sat Mar 05 07:18:51 2016 +0000 # Node ID 56863aaec2b968e1c48f92b5798437d09c4442d0 # Parent 88aebc166fa8e16f91d5f0acce77690003be9d91 PowerPC: Use GCC Altivec Intrinsics when the Processor has a Vector SIMD Facility. CMake flags CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS and CMAKE_C_FLAGS must include both -maltivec and -mabi=altivec in order for GCC to generate the PPC vector instructions.

[Former user]

Congratulations!

[David Edelsohn]

Was the patch merged into the main repository or is it only in Dan's clone?