2. Simplify handling of special cases by taking advantage of the fact that the
builtin vrsqrt approximation handles negative, zero and +inf arguments correctly.
This speeds up the SSE and AVX implementations by ~20%.
3. Make the Newton-Raphson formula used for rsqrt more numerically robust:
Before: y = y * (1.5 - x/2 * y^2)
After: y = y * (1.5 - y * (x/2) * y)
Forming y^2 can overflow for very large or very small (denormalized) values of x, while x*y ~= 1. For AVX512, this makes it possible to compute accurate results for denormal inputs down to ~1e-42 in single precision.
4. Add a faster double precision implementation for Knights Landing using the vrsqrt28 instruction and a single Newton-Raphson iteration.
Benchmark results: https://bitbucket.org/snippets/rmlarsen/5LBq9o