tech/C

• Where Does SIMD Help Post-Quantum Cryptography? A Micro-Architectural Study of ML-KEM on x86 AVX2 4 April 2026

  We systematically decompose the sources of SIMD speedup for ML-KEM (Kyber) on Intel x86-64 AVX2. By benchmarking four compilation variants, we demonstrate that GCC’s auto-vectorizer provides negligible benefit, and that hand-written AVX2 assembly delivers a $35\times$–$56\times$ performance increase for core arithmetic operations. This drives an end-to-end KEM speedup of $5.4\times$–$7.1\times$.

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