Let’s get in the ring and show what AVX/AVX2 intrinsics can really do for a non-trivial problem, and even discuss potential improvements that future CoreCLR versions could bring to the table.

Everyone needs to sort arrays, once in a while, and many algorithms we take for granted rely on doing so. We think of it as a solved problem and that nothing can be further done about it in 2020, except for waiting for newer, marginally faster machines to pop-up. However, that is not the case, and while I’m not the first to have thoughts about it; or the best at implementing it, if you join me in this rather long journey, we’ll end up with a replacement function for Array.Sort, written in pure C# that outperforms CoreCLR’s C++2 code by a factor north of 10x on most modern Intel CPUs, and north of 11x on my laptop. Sounds interesting? If so, down the rabbit hole we go…

Very well done.