Aligning data within an Offload™ context can provide a wealth of optimization opportunites for the compiler. The Playstation 3 SPUs are most efficient when operating on data aligned to at least 16 bytes. Offload™ is able to perform more optimizations on data accesses when it knows the alignment of the data.Offload™ supports both the Microsoft Visual Studio __declspec(align(#)) and GCC __attribute__((aligned((#)))) specifiers to increase the alignment of types and variables.Increasing the alignment of data accessed inside Offloaded code to 16 bytes or more results in:

• Fewer reads from the software cache,

• Faster memcpy's

• Higher performance memory access intrinsics