What's the fastest way to convert an interleaved NumPy integer array to complex64?

Question

I have a stream of incoming data that has interleaved real and imaginary integers. Converting these to complex64 values is the slowest operation in my program. This is my cu

Answer 1

[~]
|1> import numpy as np

[~]
|2> a = np.zeros(1000000, dtype=np.int16)

[~]
|3> b = a.astype(np.float32).view(np.complex64)

[~]
|4> b.shape
(500000,)

[~]
|5> b.dtype
dtype('complex64')