x264 does not use any video compression hardware. It uses only regular SIMD. I don't agree that SIMD is so specialized. It is needed where ever you have operat

x264 does not use any video compression hardware. It uses only regular SIMD. I don't agree that SIMD is so specialized. It is needed where ever you have operation over arrays of items of the same type, including memcmp, memcpy, strchr, unicode encoders/decoders/checkers, operations on pixels, radio or sound samples, accelerometer data, etc. Compilers have latency and dependency models for specific CPU arch decoders/schedulers/pipelines. Compiler authors agree that compilers should learn to do good autovectorization. But it's hard. So people use assembly.