Irrelevant i know, but: > For the purpose of our example, the exercise is to write vector code that efficiently converts a BCD string such as { 0x12, 0x34, ...

Irrelevant i know, but: > For the purpose of our example, the exercise is to write vector code that efficiently converts a BCD string such as { 0x12, 0x34, ..., 0xcd, 0xef } to a corresponding ASCII string (e.g. { '1', '2', '3', '4', ..., 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f' }). On a high-level, a solution involves separating the nibbles into single bytes and then converting each byte to the matching ASCII value. If your BCD string has 0xcd or 0xef in it, it's not BCD, is it? It's "binary coded hexadecimal", or as we usually call it, "binary". This code converts a byte string to its hex representation. It has nothing to do with BCD, right?