+1 for Duff's device. It's really not good now (as compared to the unrolled loop plus a peel) approach, as all those in-edges to a loop all through the body par

+1 for Duff's device. It's really not good now (as compared to the unrolled loop plus a peel) approach, as all those in-edges to a loop all through the body paralyze the compiler's ability to make good choices. An anecdote I often share is that we had a hotshit performance programmer who often enclosed his simple C versions of the code with: #ifdef I_DONT_CARE_ABOUT_PERFORMANCE The punchline was defining this macro and getting the C version usually improved performance over the giant festival of overly-Pentium-4-focused inline asm.