There's a real effect here, but in practice I haven't found it to be an issue. As long as your instruction mix has at least 1 256-bit operation in the last few

There's a real effect here, but in practice I haven't found it to be an issue. As long as your instruction mix has at least 1 256-bit operation in the last few million instructions, the slowdown doesn't happen. I'm sure you could construct a case where it would be a problem, but throwing in an occasional unused VPXOR solves it easily enough. One thing that can be an issue is alignment. Unless your reads are 32B aligned, you will be limited to reading 40B per cycle. While a single unaligned vector read per cycle isn't a problem, full utilization of the increased throughput that 'stephencanon' mentions in the sibling is only possible if both vectors are 32B aligned: http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=415#423 http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=415#423