Using SIMD for hardware acceleration
krishnakanthmallikc.blogspot.com
krishnakanthmallikc.blogspot.com
This gives me an excuse to post one of my favorite articles at Intel. It shows the best performance increases for this person's problem come from optimizing memory accesses.
http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/superscalar-program...
Seeing as memory read/write instructions are about 40-50% of the x86 code out there (from what I've heard) tweaking memory accesses seems to be a great way to get great performance.