Introduction This post documents the process of optimizing a small problem - generating images of the Mandelbrot Set. Although I will show a speedup of ~8x over the naive implementation (there is a part 2 that will bring this to ~100x in some cases), this is mostly meant as an example of how I go about using my knowledge of software design and computer architecture to optimize software. This post is rather long, but many of the sections are independent of each other, so feel free to use the Contents to go to the sections of interest.