Faster way to zero memory than with memset?

x86 is rather broad range of devices.

For totally generic x86 target, an assembly block with "rep movsd" could blast out zeros to memory 32-bits at time. Try to make sure the bulk of this work is DWORD aligned.

For chips with mmx, an assembly loop with movq could hit 64bits at a time.

You might be able to get a C/C++ compiler to use a 64-bit write with a pointer to a long long or _m64. Target must be 8 byte aligned for the best performance.

for chips with sse, movaps is fast, but only if the address is 16 byte aligned, so use a movsb until aligned, and then complete your clear with a loop of movaps

Win32 has "ZeroMemory()", but I forget if thats a macro to memset, or an actual 'good' implementation.

memset is generally designed to be very very fast general-purpose setting/zeroing code. It handles all cases with different sizes and alignments, which affect the kinds of instructions you can use to do your work. Depending on what system you're on (and what vendor your stdlib comes from), the underlying implementation might be in assembler specific to that architecture to take advantage of whatever its native properties are. It might also have internal special cases to handle the case of zeroing (versus setting some other value).

That said, if you have very specific, very performance critical memory zeroing to do, it's certainly possible that you could beat a specific memset implementation by doing it yourself. memset and its friends in the standard library are always fun targets for one-upmanship programming. :)