The growing popularity of multimedia extensions to general-purpose microprocessors has renewed the interest in vectorizing compilers. This book provides a detailed overview of compiler optimizations that convert sequential code into a form that exploits multimedia extensions. The primary focus is on the C programming language and multimedia extensions to the Intel® Architecture, although most conversion methods are easily generalized to other imperative programming languages and multimedia instruction sets.

The presented optimizations are available in the high performance Intel C++/Fortran compilers that support automatic vectorization for the Intel MMX™ technology and Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE). As such, the book has been written for those with an interest in improving software performance by means of multimedia extensions, such as compiler engineers and programmers of scientific, engineering, and multimedia applications.