Call me naive, but I think for any serious processing, you need to dig into the actual underlying algorithm and implementation to made difference. The hardware

Call me naive, but I think for any serious processing, you need to dig into the actual underlying algorithm and implementation to made difference. The hardware difference between generations are huge, different arch can have a big impact in term of performance (really down to the detail: cache-line, bandwidth, and SIMD inst, image processing is sensitive to all these above). Tuning your custom implementation can suddenly be worthwhile.