### 3.1 SIMD alignment and fftw_malloc

SIMD, which stands for “Single Instruction Multiple Data,” is a set of special operations supported by some processors to perform a single operation on several numbers (usually 2 or 4) simultaneously. SIMD floating-point instructions are available on several popular CPUs: SSE/SSE2/AVX/AVX2/AVX512/KCVI on some x86/x86-64 processors, AltiVec and VSX on some POWER/PowerPCs, NEON on some ARM models. FFTW can be compiled to support the SIMD instructions on any of these systems.

A program linking to an FFTW library compiled with SIMD support can obtain a nonnegligible speedup for most complex and r2c/c2r transforms. In order to obtain this speedup, however, the arrays of complex (or real) data passed to FFTW must be specially aligned in memory (typically 16-byte aligned), and often this alignment is more stringent than that provided by the usual `malloc` (etc.) allocation routines.

In order to guarantee proper alignment for SIMD, therefore, in case your program is ever linked against a SIMD-using FFTW, we recommend allocating your transform data with `fftw_malloc` and de-allocating it with `fftw_free`. These have exactly the same interface and behavior as `malloc`/`free`, except that for a SIMD FFTW they ensure that the returned pointer has the necessary alignment (by calling `memalign` or its equivalent on your OS).

You are not required to use `fftw_malloc`. You can allocate your data in any way that you like, from `malloc` to `new` (in C++) to a fixed-size array declaration. If the array happens not to be properly aligned, FFTW will not use the SIMD extensions.

Since `fftw_malloc` only ever needs to be used for real and complex arrays, we provide two convenient wrapper routines `fftw_alloc_real(N)` and `fftw_alloc_complex(N)` that are equivalent to `(double*)fftw_malloc(sizeof(double) * N)` and `(fftw_complex*)fftw_malloc(sizeof(fftw_complex) * N)`, respectively (or their equivalents in other precisions).