Convert IPv4 string representation to a 32-bit number with SSE instructions

Back in the days when I was playing with SSE instructions, I was trying to optimize every workload that I could think of. One of these was to convert thousands of IPv4 strings to 32-bit numbers for further processing. This article shows one way to optimize such a thing, and how the SSE instructions set can be used to get the better of your $1000 Intel CPU :)

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