Fastest way to clamp a real (fixed/floating point) value?

Old question, but I was working on this problem today (with doubles/floats).

The best approach is to use SSE MINSS/MAXSS for floats and SSE2 MINSD/MAXSD for doubles. These are branchless and take one clock cycle each, and are easy to use thanks to compiler intrinsics. They confer more than an order of magnitude increase in performance compared with clamping with std::min/max.

You may find that surprising. I certainly did! Unfortunately VC++ 2010 uses simple comparisons for std::min/max even when /arch:SSE2 and /FP:fast are enabled. I can't speak for other compilers.

Here's the necessary code to do this in VC++:

#include <mmintrin.h>

float minss ( float a, float b )
{
    // Branchless SSE min.
    _mm_store_ss( &a, _mm_min_ss(_mm_set_ss(a),_mm_set_ss(b)) );
    return a;
}

float maxss ( float a, float b )
{
    // Branchless SSE max.
    _mm_store_ss( &a, _mm_max_ss(_mm_set_ss(a),_mm_set_ss(b)) );
    return a;
}

float clamp ( float val, float minval, float maxval )
{
    // Branchless SSE clamp.
    // return minss( maxss(val,minval), maxval );

    _mm_store_ss( &val, _mm_min_ss( _mm_max_ss(_mm_set_ss(val),_mm_set_ss(minval)), _mm_set_ss(maxval) ) );
    return val;
}

The double precision code is the same except with xxx_sd instead.

Edit: Initially I wrote the clamp function as commented. But looking at the assembler output I noticed that the VC++ compiler wasn't smart enough to cull the redundant move. One less instruction. :)

Ternary operator is really the way to go, because most compilers are able to compile them into a native hardware operation that uses a conditional move instead of a branch (and thus avoids the mispredict penalty and pipeline bubbles and so on). Bit-manipulation is likely to cause a load-hit-store.

In particular, PPC and x86 with SSE2 have a hardware op that could be expressed as an intrinsic something like this:

double fsel( double a, double b, double c ) {
  return a >= 0 ? b : c; 
}

The advantage is that it does this inside the pipeline, without causing a branch. In fact, if your compiler uses the intrinsic, you can use it to implement your clamp directly:

inline double clamp ( double a, double min, double max ) 
{
   a = fsel( a - min , a, min );
   return fsel( a - max, max, a );
}

I strongly suggest you avoid bit-manipulation of doubles using integer operations. On most modern CPUs there is no direct means of moving data between double and int registers other than by taking a round trip to the dcache. This will cause a data hazard called a load-hit-store which basically empties out the CPU pipeline until the memory write has completed (usually around 40 cycles or so).

The exception to this is if the double values are already in memory and not in a register: in that case there is no danger of a load-hit-store. However your example indicates you've just calculated the double and returned it from a function which means it's likely to still be in XMM1.