In
computing
Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, ...
, interleaving of data refers to the interspersing of
fields or channels of different meaning sequentially in
memory
Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered ...
, in
processor registers
A processor register is a quickly accessible location available to a computer's processor. Registers usually consist of a small amount of fast storage, although some registers have specific hardware functions, and may be read-only or write-only. ...
, or in
file format
A file format is a Computer standard, standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary format, pr ...
s. For example, for
coordinate
In geometry, a coordinate system is a system that uses one or more numbers, or coordinates, to uniquely determine the position of the points or other geometric elements on a manifold such as Euclidean space. The order of the coordinates is si ...
data,
:
x0 y0 z0 w0 x1 y1 z1 w1 x2 y2 z2 w2
:
x0 x1 x2 x3 y0 y1 y2 y3 z0 z1 z2 z3 w0 w1 w2 w3
the former is interleaved while the latter is not.
A processor may support
permute instruction
Permute (and Shuffle) instructions, part of bit manipulation as well as vector processing, copy unaltered contents from a source array to a destination array, where the indices are specified by a second source array. The size (bitwidth) of the so ...
s, or strided
load and store instructions, for moving between interleaved and non-interleaved representations.
Interleaving has performance implications for
cache coherency
In computer architecture, cache coherence is the uniformity of shared resource data that ends up stored in multiple local caches. When clients in a system maintain caches of a common memory resource, problems may arise with incoherent data, whi ...
, ease of leveraging
SIMD
Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) is a type of parallel processing in Flynn's taxonomy. SIMD can be internal (part of the hardware design) and it can be directly accessible through an instruction set architecture (ISA), but it should ...
hardware, and leveraging a computer's
addressing mode
Addressing modes are an aspect of the instruction set architecture in most central processing unit (CPU) designs. The various addressing modes that are defined in a given instruction set architecture define how the machine language instructions ...
s. (e.g. - interleaved data may require one address to be calculated, from which individual fields may then be accessed via
immediate offsets; conversely if only one field is required by index, de-interleaved data may leverage
scaled index addressing).
See also
*
AOS vs SOA In computing, array of structures (AoS), structure of arrays (SoA) and array of structures of arrays (AoSoA) refer to contrasting ways to arrange a sequence of records in memory, with regard to interleaving, and are of interest in SIMD and SIMT pro ...
*
Data-oriented design
*
Locality of reference
In computer science, locality of reference, also known as the principle of locality, is the tendency of a processor to access the same set of memory locations repetitively over a short period of time. There are two basic types of reference localit ...
*
Parallel array In computing, a group of parallel arrays (also known as structure of arrays or SoA) is a form of implicit data structure that uses multiple arrays to represent a singular array of records. It keeps a separate, homogeneous data array for each field ...
s
*
Planar image format
This is a glossary of terms relating to computer graphics.
For more general computer hardware terms, see glossary of computer hardware terms.
0–9
A
B
...
*
Packed pixel format
References
Computer memory
Computer data storage
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