Patent ID: 11947962
Assignee: ARM LIMITED
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G | IPC G

Claim 0:
1. An apparatus comprising:
processing circuitry to perform vector processing operations on vectors comprising a plurality of vector elements; and
an instruction decoder to decode program instructions to control the processing circuitry to perform the vector processing operations;
wherein in response to a replicate partition instruction specifying partition information defining positions of a plurality of partitions with a variable number of vector elements within a result vector, wherein each partition of the plurality of partitions is contiguous in the result vector with no other vector elements of the result vector between adjacent partitions of the plurality of partitions, each partition comprising at least one vector element of the result vector and at least one partition comprising a plurality of adjacent vector elements of the result vector, the instruction decoder is configured to control the processing circuitry to generate the result vector in which each partition comprises at least a value corresponding to a selected vector element position of a source vector and each partition having more than one vector element comprises values corresponding to a sequence of vector elements of a source vector starting or ending at the selected vector element position, wherein each encoding of the partition information which specifies the at least one partition comprising the plurality of adjacent vector elements constrains the selected vector element position to be the same for each of the plurality of partitions, and wherein the replicate partition instruction is capable of specifying at least one given partition comprising a given plurality of adjacent vector elements of the result vector wherein at least two of the given plurality of adjacent vector elements in said at least one given partition take different values to each other;
wherein at least one encoding of the partition information is capable of defining at least two of said plurality of partitions having a number of vector elements other than a power of 2, to provide a result vector comprising a plurality of adjacent repetitions of a sequence of N result vector elements with no other result vector element between the adjacent repetitions, where the sequence of N result vector elements corresponds to N adjacent elements in the source vector, and where N is a number other than a power of 2.