Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) is the concept of having each instruction operate on a small chunk or vector of data elements. CPU vector instruction sets include: x86 SSE and AVX, ARM NEON, and PowerPC AltiVec. To efficiently use SIMD instructions, data needs to be in structure-of-arrays form and should occur in longer streams. Naively "SIMD optimized" code frequently surprises by running slower than the original.
