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How hard could it be?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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I might be wrong, but doesn't SSE require you to explicitly use it in C/C++? Laying out your data as arrays and specifically calling the SIMD operations on them?
There’s absolutely nothing you can do in C that you can’t also do in assembly. Because assembly is just the bunch of bits that the compiler generates.
That said, you’d have to be insane to write a game featuring SIMD instructions these days in assembly.
I think they meant the other way around, that if you wanted to use it in C/C++, you'd have to either use assembly or some specific SSE construct otherwise the compiler wouldn't bother.
That probably was the case at one point, but I'd be surprised if it's still the case. Though maybe that's part of the reason why the Intel compiler can generate faster code. But I suspect it's more of a case of better optimization by people who have a better understanding of how it works under the hood, and maybe better utilization of newer instruction set extensions.
SSE has been around for a long time and is present in most (all?) x86 chips these days and I'd be very surprised if gcc and other popular compilers don't use it effectively today. Some of the other extensions might be different though.
Oh I see your point. Yeah, I think they meant that. And yes, there was a time you’d have to do trickery in C to force the use of SSE or whatever extensions you wanted to use.