title: Is SSE redundant or discouraged?
body: <p>Looking around here and the internet, I can find a lot of posts about modern compilers beating SSE in many real situations, and I have just encountered in some code I inherited that when I disable some SSE code written in 2006 for integer-based image processing and force the code down the standard C branch, it runs faster.</p>
  
  <p>On modern processors with multiple cores and advanced pipelining, etc, does older SSE code underperform <code>gcc -O2</code>?</p>