[eklitzke]

This particular routine doesn't seem that useful, but sometimes these weird vector algorithms that don't seem useful on their own are composed together in interesting ways to solve a larger, more interesting problem. For example, there was a cppcon talk a few years ago where the presenter came up with a novel way of using AVX instructions to efficiently find the median of seven (yes, exactly seven) integers, by coming up with a novel representation of the problem that AVX instructions were well-suited for.^[1]

That said, I don't know if this particular routine is something the author came up with while working on some other problem, or if it's just a neat idea that he came up with and wrote a short blog post about.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qejTqnxQRcw