What's the most efficient way to load and extract 32 bit integer values from a 128 bit SSE vector?

Question

I\'m trying to optimize my code using SSE intrinsics but am running into a problem where I don\'t know of a good way to extract the integer values from a vector after I\'ve

Answer 1

_mm_extract_epi32

The extract intrinsics is indeed the best option but if you need to support SSE2, I'd recommend this:

inline int get_x(const __m128i& vec){return _mm_cvtsi128_si32 (vec);}
inline int get_y(const __m128i& vec){return _mm_cvtsi128_si32 (_mm_shuffle_epi32(vec,0x55));}
inline int get_z(const __m128i& vec){return _mm_cvtsi128_si32 (_mm_shuffle_epi32(vec,0xAA));}
inline int get_w(const __m128i& vec){return _mm_cvtsi128_si32 (_mm_shuffle_epi32(vec,0xFF));}

I've found that if you reinterpret_cast/union the vector to any int[4] representation the compiler tends to flush things back to memory (which may not be that bad) and reads it back as an int, though I haven't looked at the assembly to see if the latest versions of the compilers generate better code.

Answer 2

It depends on what you can assume about the minimum level of SSE support that you have.

Going all the way back to SSE2 you have _mm_extract_epi16 (PEXTRW) which can be used to extract any 16 bit element from a 128 bit vector. You would need to call this twice to get the two halves of a 32 bit element.

In more recent versions of SSE (SSE4.1 and later) you have _mm_extract_epi32 (PEXTRD) which can extract a 32 bit element in one instruction.

Alternatively if this is not inside a performance-critical loop you can just use a union, e.g.

typedef union
{
    __m128i v;
    int32_t a[4];
} U32;