First step towards making better use of AVX's implicit zeroing of the upper half of a 256-bit vector by instructions that only act on the lower 128-bit vector - discussed on D14151.
As well as the fact that 128-bit shuffle instructions are generally more capable, this can be performant for older CPUs with 128-bit ALUs (e.g. Jaguar, Sandy Bridge) that must treat 256-bit vectors as multiple micro-ops.
Note: I've avoided combining shuffles that reference elements from the upper halves of the input vectors - this may be reviewed in future work as well (AVX1 would probably always gain, but AVX2 does have some cross-lane shuffle instructions).
Hi Simon,
Why you are doing this in PerformShuffleCombine and not in the lowerVectorShuffle()? As far as I understand, we call "combine" in order to combine multiple nodes. In this case, you just optimize one node.