[GHC] #8107: need types to express constant argument for primop correctness

[GHC]

#8107: need types to express constant argument  for primop correctness
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        Reporter:  carter            |            Owner:
            Type:  feature request   |           Status:  new
        Priority:  normal            |        Milestone:  7.10.1
       Component:  Compiler          |          Version:  7.7
      Resolution:                    |         Keywords:
Operating System:  Unknown/Multiple  |     Architecture:  Unknown/Multiple
 Type of failure:  None/Unknown      |       Difficulty:  Unknown
       Test Case:                    |       Blocked By:
        Blocking:                    |  Related Tickets:
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Changes (by carter):

 * version:  7.6.3 => 7.7
 * type:  bug => feature request
 * milestone:   => 7.10.1


Comment:

 In some of the prior examples, I was misinterpreting that int parameter
 for prefetch to be related to the int parameter that is in the GCC/CLANG
 prefetch intrinsics, which it is not.


 That said: the notion of "static/compile time constant arguments" will be
 ESSENTIAL for correctly expressing/exposing fully general prefetch, as
 well as the general case of many of the SIMD instructions for AVX1, AVX2,
 as well as the much more interesting 32SIMD register, 512 bit, conditional
 mixing AVX512 instructions, etc.

 The richer AVX512 instructions will be in  Intel's Knights Landing, which
 is going to be the first generation of Intel mainboard CPUs that will have
 ~ 40+ cores on a single die. And I believe we're quite keen on making sure
 GHC works amazing on such many core hardware. Its worth noting that Knight
 Landing will be the first generation of those many core CPU's to have
 support via an LLVM backend as well.


 I believe this is something worth taking the time to work out, and have
 ready by GHC 7.10.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/8107#comment:7>
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