bitonic sort is O(n log(n)^2), which hardly makes a difference in normal sizes (benchmarks are on 10k, which is small). The power of 2 requirement only applies

bitonic sort is O(n log(n)^2), which hardly makes a difference in normal sizes (benchmarks are on 10k, which is small). The power of 2 requirement only applies to the core kernel. All CPUs in usage today are parallel (in 3 to 4 different ways), and bitonic sort is the best performing sort on both amd64 and aarch64.