Taking full advantage of many of the specialized instructions (SSE) in an Intel chip requires assembly language. One of my recent hobby projects rearranges the

Taking full advantage of many of the specialized instructions (SSE) in an Intel chip requires assembly language. One of my recent hobby projects rearranges the bits in a large set of data using the SSE instructions, and it's an order of magnitude faster than doing it in C. "Assembly language" is a bit of a misnomer. What we're talking about is writing hardware instructions and laying out bytes in memory directly. Learning the syntax takes about 5 minutes.