FFTW is one of the seminal examples of the importance of cache awareness, if I remember my history correctly. As I understand it, the reason the fftw authors (M

FFTW is one of the seminal examples of the importance of cache awareness, if I remember my history correctly. As I understand it, the reason the fftw authors (Matteo Frigo and Steven G. Johnson) won the Wilkinson prize was essentially because fftw exemplified the importance of cache-aware algorithms, as opposed to blindly optimizing number of operations. I don't know, but I would guess that intel's implementation post-dates fftw?