Absolutely, look into your standard library, CPU built-ins and intrinsics first. However, these tricks are not useless even on modern CPUs. There are scalar in

Absolutely, look into your standard library, CPU built-ins and intrinsics first. However, these tricks are not useless even on modern CPUs. There are scalar instructions for a lot of this stuff, but if you are working with SIMD, several of them are not available. Recently I wrote bit interleaving stuff with Morton codes. Maybe the scalar instruction would be faster in isolation but I already have my data in SSE registers for other arithmetic so in total it was probably faster. I used the code in this article as a basis.