Rust SIMD Benchmark

Performance comparison of three SIMD implementations: Scalar vs std::simd vs NEON

Tested on Apple M4 (MacBook Pro 2024)

Requirements

• Rust nightly (for std::simd / portable SIMD)
• Apple Silicon Mac (M1/M2/M3/M4) for NEON intrinsics

Setup

rustup install nightly
rustup override set nightly  # Use nightly in current directory

Running Benchmarks

Quick Test

cargo run --release

Criterion Detailed Benchmark

cargo bench

Results are saved in target/criterion/ directory with HTML reports.

Project Structure

src/
├── lib.rs          # Three implementations: scalar, portable_simd, neon
└── main.rs         # Simple benchmark runner
benches/
└── simd_bench.rs   # Criterion benchmarks

Test Scenarios

Category	Scenario	Description
Image Processing	RGB to Grayscale	1920x1080 image conversion
Audio Processing	Volume Adjustment	880K samples with gain control
Audio Processing	Two-track Mixing	Stereo audio mixing
String Search	Count Bytes	Count newlines in 10MB text
String Search	Find Byte	Find character position
Numerical	Dot Product	10M element float vectors
Numerical	Matrix-Vector Multiply	1024x1024 matrix
Validation	Range Check	Verify values in range
Validation	Sorted Check	Verify array is sorted

Blog Post

For detailed experimental analysis and code explanations, please see BLOG.md