Counting 1 bits (population count) on large data using AVX-512 or AVX-2
I have a long chunk of memory, say, 256 KiB or longer. I want to count the number of 1 bits in this entire chunk, or in other words: Add up the "population count" values for all bytes. I know that AVX-512 has a VPOPCNTDQ instruction which counts the number of 1 bits in each consecutive 64 bits within a 512-bit vector, and IIANM it should be possible to issue one of these every cycle (if an appropriate SIMD vector register is available) - but I don't have any experience writing SIMD code (I'm more of a GPU guy). Also, I'm not 100% sure about compiler support for AVX-512 targets. On most CPUs,