[kstrauser]

Is there any advantage in a CPU to doing 32-bit math instead of 128-bit? My first guess is that this would make pointer operations much slower.

[garmaine]

Most CPUs do not support 128-bit integer math. They would do do 64-bit integer ops with carry. In most architectures that would be no different in code size from a 64-bit op followed by a 32-bit op.

[phamilton]

Very complex compilers and/or cisc decoders on superscaler processors could theoretically rewrite some 128-bit to 32-bit and run the computations concurrently with other 128-bit computations.