.. Copyright (c) 2016, Johan Mabille, Sylvain Corlay 

   Distributed under the terms of the BSD 3-Clause License.

   The full license is in the file LICENSE, distributed with this software.

.. _arch-manipulation:
Architecture Manipulation
=========================

xsimd provides an high level description of the instruction sets it manipulates.
The mentioned types are primarily used as template parameters for :ref:`batch
<xsimd-batch-ref>`, and when interacting with :cpp:func:`xsimd::dispatch()`.

The best available architecture is available at compile time through
``xsimd::best_arch`` which is what ``xsimd::default_arch`` defaults to unless otherwise
configured.

.. doxygengroup:: architectures
   :project: xsimd
   :members:


.. _emulated-mode:
Emulated Mode
-------------

When compiled with the macro ``XSIMD_WITH_EMULATED`` set to ``1``, xsimd also
exhibits a specific architecture ``xsimd::emulated<N>``, which consists of a
vector of ``N`` bits emulated using scalar mode.
It is mostly available for testing and debugging.