Fastest way to count number of 1s in a register, ARM assembly

Question

So I had an interview question before regarding bit manipulation. The company is a well known GPU company. I had very little background in assembly language (weird despite b

Answer 1

long count_bits_long (long);

    vmov.32 d0[0], r0       // R0 --> SIMD

    vcnt.8  d0, d0          // count bits in bytes
    vpaddl.u8 d0, d0        // add adjacent pairs of bytes and put into 16b words
    vpaddl.u16 d0, d0       // add adjacent pairs of 16b words and put into 32b word

    vmov.32 r0, d0[0]       // SIMD --> R0

    mov pc, lr              // return