METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR PERFORMING SIMD GATHER AND COPY OPERATIONS

Systems and methods relate to efficient memory operations. A single instruction multiple data (SIMD) gather operation is implemented with a gather result buffer located within or in close proximity to memory, to receive or gather multiple data elements from multiple orthogonal locations in a memory, and once the gather result buffer is complete, the gathered data is transferred to a processor register. A SIMD copy operation is performed by executing two or more instructions for copying multiple data elements from multiple orthogonal source addresses to corresponding multiple destination addresses within the memory, without an intermediate copy to a processor register. Thus, the memory operations are performed in a background mode without direction by the processor.