Yes you're right lol it's 0.0009 microseconds is faster than 1 millisecond.

so the SSE2 timing gave me 3 milliseconds and the asm timing gave me 900 microseconds. I got confused with the whole second conversion to microseconds and milliseconds. The output of the time elapsed is in milliseconds.

You realize that aligned malloc is usually just a wrapper around regular malloc that enforces the alignment? and that malloc is a kernel call that requires context switch, acquiring a lock, and various data structure manipulation? You're doing like 1000x the work in that one call than the rest of the function. You should never return memory like that from a function, it'd bad form and requires the caller to free it (and know to use aligned free).

Slightly better code below, but the whole idea of this function is flawed in the first place.

typedef union Float4
{
    __m128 v;
    float x[4];
};

inline float _sse2_min(float a, float b)
{
    __m128 _a = _mm_set_ps1(a);
    __m128 _b = _mm_set_ps1(b);
    Float4 c;
    c.v = _mm_min_ps(_a,_b);
    return c.x[0];
}

Generally, SIMD code is only an advantage when you layout your data in a vector-friendly format (structures of arrays), then you can directly load/store_ps and operate on multiple values at once and get close to 4x speedup.

Yeah, SSE is not made for operating on regular floats. You eigther need to process 4 values at the same time, and/or perform a series of SSE-operations on the same values to minimize time spent on shoving values between registers for there to be a performance improvement.

I see what you guys are getting at. Yeah I didn't expect to run small floating operations using SSE and had the idea that SSE had to have 16-bit aligned or else exceptions would be thrown. I started working with the DIrectXMath not XNA like I was using before. An exception kept on being thrown each time the camera class wasn't aligned properly. Again you're absolutely right Juliean about the vectors. I wanted to dive into knowing SSE2 and gain some knowledge in ASM a bit. Again Aressera you're code fits the bill because I was wasting memory and it was a potentially more hazardous on memory leak. The code wasn't meant to be used in game engine - just seeing if I could learn more about SSE2. I didn't know the aligned_malloc was a wrapper function of malloc.

You realize that aligned malloc is usually just a wrapper around regular malloc that enforces the alignment? and that malloc is a kernel call that requires context switch, acquiring a lock, and various data structure manipulation? You're doing like 1000x the work in that one call than the rest of the function. You should never return memory like that from a function, it'd bad form and requires the caller to free it (and know to use aligned free).