[modeless]

Forget Quicksort. What percentage of your CPU time is spent running SIMD-optimized implementations of anything? And what percent of those are upgraded to new SIMD instructions each year? And what real world percentage gains are they getting considering other constraints like memory bandwidth, power, etc? The answers to these questions, multiplied together, put a very small upper bound on the overall benefit of new instructions per year.

[janwas]

If you're watching videos, quite a lot. Also, of the five image codecs mentioned here to succeed PNG/JPG, all have SIMD-enabled implementations: https://cloudinary.com/blog/time_for_next_gen_codecs_to_deth...

I share your concern about new SIMD instructions not being used. It seems to me we're at an inflection point, though. ISAs such as RISC-V and SVE will enable (properly written) software to benefit from future wider vectors without even recompiling. github.com/google/highway (disclosure: I am the main author) lets you write your code only once, and target newer instructions whenever they are available, with transparent fallback to other codepaths for CPUs.

Given the various physical realities including power efficiency, I believe there will be considerably more SIMD usage within the next few years.