> but fma instructions are not so heavily used that they can be thought of as the single workhorse of a processor. Well, indeed, a lot of cycles are lost for m

> but fma instructions are not so heavily used that they can be thought of as the single workhorse of a processor. Well, indeed, a lot of cycles are lost for moving the data around, branching, waiting for memory. But when it comes to floating point computation, well, FMA is really common. In floating point inner loops it's just so usual to need to do "x := x + a * b". I didn't say single workhorse of computer, but for DSP type of stuff FMA rocks. Dot product, matmul, even fft -- a lot of FPU heavy computation directly benefits from FMA. Anyways, even without FMA, you can do a lot of ops per value and still be memory bound.