[Pixman] [cairo] Floating point API in Pixman

[Jonathan Morton]

> > > I suspect using floats would be *much* better than the existing fixeds
> > > on modern x86_64 systems.  But fixed will remain important on smaller,
> > > lighter systems for some time to come.
> > 
> > I believe so too, and I have some actual numbers to back it up.

> You forgot to attach the numbers. :)

Well, here is a very brief but representative example:

(float)  src_8888_8_0565 =  L1: 111.99  L2: 113.84  M:105.89 ( 20.72%)  HT: 64.94  VT: 78.99  R: 55.08  RT: 23.74 ( 329Kops/s)
(fixed)  src_8888_8_0565 =  L1:  62.29  L2:  63.66  M: 63.02 ( 12.64%)  HT: 59.05  VT: 57.64  R: 52.52  RT: 32.20 ( 446Kops/s)

Most of the numbers are Mpix/s, the %-age numbers in the middle are of
estimated available memory bandwidth.  The floating-point path has a
large (50%+) advantage in throughput, while the fixed-point path seems
to have less setup overhead which shows up on tiny (8x8) operations.

And that's not exactly the most complex operation on the table.  In
fixed-point, it's a multiply by the unified mask followed by a 3-channel
format conversion.  Much more trivial than that and you get memcpy().

This is all achieved by using lookup tables to accelerate the
fixed-to-float conversions (tables are pre-generated up to 16bpc),
leaving only the store operations to be run through a real
float-to-fixed converter.

-- 
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From: Jonathan Morton
      jonathan.morton at movial.com