SSE3 with characters in C

[dealmaster00]

Does anyone know how to use SSE3 with characters in C? What I want to do is to pack 16 characters into the 128 bit registers SSE3 uses and add them (in order to optimize a summing function - where I need to sum characters). However I cannot find any documentation about this online...like, anywhere. If anyone can point me to an SSE3 reference that has this information (or posting if you know how to do it), that would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[CTho9305]

for gcc
for MS Visual C++

 

[dealmaster00]

ah thanks. I found out that I need to use the epi8 suffix (chars are 8 bits) on most functions. This page was pretty useful: http://developer.apple.com/hardwaredrivers/ve/sse.html

edit: turns out I was completely wrong about the above, had to do something different and unfortunately sse3 made my code slower.