Regardless, Clang and GCC both support function multi-versioning where you supply multiple versions of a function and specify which CPU features each implementation needs, and the best version of the function will be selected at runtime based on the results of cpuid. For example, you can use this to write a function that uses no vector instructions, SEE, AVX2, or AVX512 and all versions will be compiled into the executable and the best version you can actually use will be selected at runtime. This is how glibc selects the optimal version of functions like memset/memcpy/memcmp, as there are vector instructions that significantly speed these functions up.

There's an LWN article about the feature if you're curious how it works: https://lwn.net/Articles/691932/

What we do is dispatch to the best available instruction set at runtime - that costs only an indirect branch, plus somewhat larger binary and longer compile time.

I don't see how this is relevant to anything.

Sniff, already superceded by Alder Lake.