Comment by drichel

Counting bits was the bottleneck in the genomic scan I co-authored (Kanoungi et al. 2020). popcnt resulted in insane perfomance gains comared to all other methods.

However, we re-discovered the fact that some Intel CPUs, including the Nehalem mentioned in the article, have a bug that severly affects popcnt's performance, see for example here: https://github.com/komrad36/LATCH/issues/3#issuecomment-2671...