Can PTEST be used to test if two registers are both zero or some other condition?

Question

What can you do with SSE4.1 ptest other than testing if a single register is all-zero?

Can you use a combination of SF and CF to test anything useful about two unkno

Answer 1

No, unless I'm missing something clever, ptest with two unknown registers is generally not useful for checking some property about both of them. (Other than obvious stuff you'd already want a bitwise-AND for, like intersection between two bitmaps).

To test two registers for both being all-zero, OR them together and PTEST that against itself.

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ptest xmm0, xmm1 produces two results:

• ZF = is xmm0 & xmm1 all-zero?
• CF = is (~xmm0) & xmm1 all-zero?

If the second vector is all-zero, the flags don't depend at all on the bits in the first vector.

It may be useful to think of the "is-all-zero" checks as a NOT(bitwise horizontal-OR()) of the AND and ANDNOT results. But probably not, because that's too many steps for my brain to think through easily. That sequence of vertical-AND and then horizontal-OR does maybe make it easier to understand why PTEST doesn't tell you much about a combination of two unknown registers, just like the integer TEST instruction.

Here's a truth table for a 2-bit ptest a,mask. Hopefully this helps in thinking about mixes of zeros and ones with 128b inputs.

Note that CF(a,mask) == ZF(~a,mask).

a    mask     ZF    CF
00   00       1     1
01   00       1     1
10   00       1     1
11   00       1     1

00   01       1     0
01   01       0     1
10   01       1     0
11   01       0     1

00   10       1     0
01   10       1     0
10   10       0     1
11   10       0     1

00   11       1     0
01   11       0     0
10   11       0     0
11   11       0     1

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Intel's intrinsics guide lists 2 interesting intrinsics for it. Note the naming of the args: a and mask are a clue that they tell you about the parts of a selected by a known AND-mask.

• _mm_test_mix_ones_zeros (__m128i a, __m128i mask): returns (ZF == 0 && CF == 0)
• _mm_test_all_zeros (__m128i a, __m128i mask): returns ZF

There's also the more simply-named versions:

• int _mm_testc_si128 (__m128i a, __m128i b): returns CF
• int _mm_testnzc_si128 (__m128i a, __m128i b): returns (ZF == 0 && CF == 0)
• int _mm_testz_si128 (__m128i a, __m128i b): returns ZF

There are AVX2 __m256i versions of those intrinsics, but the guide only lists the all_zeros and mix_ones_zeros alternate-name versions for __m128i operands.

If you want to test some other condition from C or C++, you should use testc and testz with the same operands, and hope that your compiler realizes that it only needs to do one PTEST, and hopefully even use a single JCC, SETCC, or CMOVCC to implement your logic. (I'd recommend checking the asm, at least for the compiler you care about most.)

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Note that _mm_testz_si128(v, set1(0xff)) is always the same as _mm_testz_si128(v,v), because that's how AND works. But that's not true for the CF result.

You can check for a vector being all-ones using

bool is_all_ones = _mm_testc_si128(v, _mm_set1_epi8(0xff));

This is probably no faster, but smaller code-size, than a PCMPEQB against a vector of all-ones, then the usual movemask + cmp. It doesn't avoid the need for a vector constant.

PTEST does have the advantage that it doesn't destroy either input operand, even without AVX.