What is the fastest/most efficient way to find the highest set bit (msb) in an integer in C?

Question

If I have some integer n, and I want to know the position of the most significant bit (that is, if the least significant bit is on the right, I want to know the position of

Answer 1

This should be lightning fast:

int msb(unsigned int v) {
  static const int pos[32] = {0, 1, 28, 2, 29, 14, 24, 3,
    30, 22, 20, 15, 25, 17, 4, 8, 31, 27, 13, 23, 21, 19,
    16, 7, 26, 12, 18, 6, 11, 5, 10, 9};
  v |= v >> 1;
  v |= v >> 2;
  v |= v >> 4;
  v |= v >> 8;
  v |= v >> 16;
  v = (v >> 1) + 1;
  return pos[(v * 0x077CB531UL) >> 27];
}