zlacker

The usual technique is to keep a 4-element array of sums (so sum[j] is the sum of all terms of the form a[4*i + j] * b[4*i + j]), and then take the total at the very end. This allows for the use of vectorization even with strict IEEE-compliance.

Generally, I would recommend against -ffast-math mostly because it enables -ffinite-math-only and that one can really blow up in your face. Most other flags (like -funsafe-math-operations) aren't that bad from an accuracy standpoint. Obviously you should not turn them on for code that you have actually tuned to minimize error, but in other cases they barely ever degrade the results.