today i went through few presentation regarding vector computations on x86 1 2 3, which nowadays mostly means using SSE instructions. author suggests that most of the times it has to be used explicitly, in order to be used at all. to be honest i haven't used these instructions in real-life applications yet. it can be an interesting topic to learn, though, honestly in any more complicated code i'd prefer to relay on some good library to do this for me. C++'s templates is mechanism good enough to hide these details. if you add C++0x features like rvalue reference, you're home.