Fast Quicksort Implementation Using AVX Instructions

This article describes a technique for implementing the quicksort sorting algorithm. Our method ‘vectorizes’ the computations and leverages the capabilities of the advanced vector extensions (AVX) instructions, available on Intel Core processors, and of the AVX2 instructions that were introduced with Intel's recent architecture codename Haswell. Our solution offers several advantages when compared with other high-performance sorting implementations, such as the radix sort, as implemented in Intel IPP library, or the introsort, as implemented in the $\hbox {C}{++}$ STL. In addition to sorting numeric arrays, our method can also be used to sort complex structures with numeric keys and even pointers to such structures.