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The Weird Concept of Branchless Programming

(sanixdk.xyz)
170 points judicious | 4 comments | 28 Sep 25 16:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.602s | source
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Legend2440 ◴[28 Sep 25 18:04 UTC] No.45406467[source]▶
Article doesn’t mention this, but I’d consider neural networks a form of branchless programming. It’s all a bunch of multiply and threshold operations.
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1. abyesilyurt ◴[28 Sep 25 18:09 UTC] No.45406503[source]▶
Thresholding requires branching no?
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2. WJW ◴[28 Sep 25 18:32 UTC] No.45406688[source]▶
No, you can do that without branching. See https://en.algorithmica.org/hpc/pipelining/branchless/#predi... for example.
3. Legend2440 ◴[28 Sep 25 18:33 UTC] No.45406694[source]▶
No, it’s just a math operation and can be applied to any amount of data in parallel.
4. bqmjjx0kac ◴[28 Sep 25 20:05 UTC] No.45407482[source]▶
As demonstrated in the article, you can compute clamp(x, min, max) with straight-line code.