> I simply meant that the bare xxxintrin.h stuff is annoying enough that if you're using it directly you might as well write assembly. The compiler is aware of

> I simply meant that the bare xxxintrin.h stuff is annoying enough that if you're using it directly you might as well write assembly. The compiler is aware of many of those intrinsics and can perform optimizations around them. Hand rolling all of that in Assembly would be quite the chore. Using these intrinsics is, IMO, considerably easier.