Platform-Independent SIMD in Go

David Chase and Junyang Shao 24 September 2026

Go 1.26 and 1.27 include experimental APIs for Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) operations. SIMD is a native feature of many modern CPUs that allows software to perform uniform operations across vectors of data very quickly, such as adding 8 pairs of float64 values in a single instruction. It can significantly speed up many computationally-intensive tasks, ranging from cryptography to data processing to AI. In fact, Go's Green Tea garbage collector even makes use of SIMD to accelerate scanning memory for live objects.

Prior to these new experimental APIs, the only way to access this functionality from Go was by writing Go assembly. This was only worth it for truly performance-critical compute kernels, which meant plenty of software that could benefit from SIMD simply left a lot of the CPU unused.