MKL is not magic. It doesn't use special secret instructions that no one else can use. The Intel engineers who work on it are not genetically-designed evil su

MKL is not magic. It doesn't use special secret instructions that no one else can use. The Intel engineers who work on it are not genetically-designed evil super optimization geniuses. Hand-optimizing math libraries does not require information that isn't available in Intel's optimization manuals or determinable from simple experiments. It is absolutely possible to beat MKL. There's just not much reason for most people to bother doing so, when MKL (and other competing libraries) are already available for them to use. All of the "modern" numerical computing environments can use whatever BLAS and FFT (and ...) libraries are available on the host system, including MKL. What new languages offer isn't (usually) better execution speed (though there's still plenty that can be done with optimizing evaluation of linear algebra expressions at a high level), it's faster and more pleasant development of numerical codes.