SIMD isn’t the “end all”, but upcoming Intel chips have instructions for handling 8 doubles or 16 floats per instruction, and if you’re trying to implement a video codec or large-scale physics simulation, an order of magnitude of speed difference can make or break your app.<p>To take an example where timeliness is crucial, think of the difference between, say, 10 frames per second vs. 60 frames per second in a first-person shooter game.