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Asked: 2026-06-09T11:58:23+00:00

Is it safe/possible/advisable to cast floats directly to __m128 if they are 16 byte

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Is it safe/possible/advisable to cast floats directly to __m128 if they are 16 byte aligned?

I noticed using _mm_load_ps and _mm_store_ps to “wrap” a raw array adds a significant overhead.

What are potential pitfalls I should be aware of?

EDIT :

There is actually no overhead in using the load and store instructions, I got some numbers mixed and that is why I got better performance. Even thou I was able to do some HORRENDOUS mangling with raw memory addresses in a __m128 instance, when I ran the test it took TWICE AS LONG to complete without the _mm_load_ps instruction, probably falling back to some fail safe code path.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    What makes you think that _mm_load_ps and _mm_store_ps “add a significant overhead” ? This is the normal way to load/store float data to/from SSE registers assuming source/destination is memory (and any other method eventually boils down to this anyway).

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