google/cpu_features

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2618 stars · 305 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

A cross-platform C99 library from Google for detecting CPU features (like available instruction sets) at runtime. It supports many architectures including x86/amd64, AArch64, ARM, MIPS, POWER, RISC-V, and s390x.

Use cases

• detect cpu instruction set support at runtime
• check if simd extensions like avx2 or neon are available
• write portable code that dispatches to optimized code paths per cpu
• query cpu microarchitecture and cache info in c or c++
• avoid illegal instruction crashes on older cpus

When to choose

• you need reliable runtime CPU feature detection across many architectures and operating systems
• you are writing performance-critical C/C++ code with multiple optimized code paths
• you want a small, well-tested, Apache-2.0 licensed C library maintained by Google

When to avoid

• you only target a single fixed CPU architecture and can rely on compile-time flags
• you need GPU or accelerator capability detection rather than CPU features
• you work in a language ecosystem with its own built-in CPUID facilities

Facets

library · maturity stable

developer-tools developer-tools hardware cross-platform windows cpp c cpu-features runtime-detection c99 microarchitecture instruction-set simd cross-platform linux macos

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="google/cpu_features")