Vectorizing Code on Sandy Bridge with AVX and SSE

Over at the Walking Randomly blog, Michael Croucher from the University of Manchester writes that there are many routes for programmers to take advantage of AVX vectorization on Sandy Bridge CPUs.

Since working with intrinsics is such hard work, why not let the compiler take the strain? Many modern compilers can automatically vectorize your C, C++ or Fortran code including gcc, PGI and Intel. Sometimes all you need to do is add an extra switch at compile time and reap the speed benefits. In truth, vectorization isn’t always automatic and the programmer needs to give the compiler some assistance but it is a lot easier than hand-coding intrinsics.

Read the Full Story.