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SIMD City: Auto-Vectorisation

51 pointsby brewmarche12/20/202511 commentsview on HN

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Scaevolustoday at 5:03 AM

Auto-vectorization is consistently one of the least predictable optimization passes, which is rather awful, since when it doesn't trigger your functions are suddenly >3x slower. This drives people to more explicit SIMD coding, from direct assembly like in FFMPEG to wrappers providing some cross-platform support like Google's Highway.

It's just really hard to detect and exploit profitable and safe vectorization opportunities. The theory behind some of the optimizers is beautiful, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytope_model

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