People care about time, not cycles, and chances are with whatever crystal is running your AVR, you will still not be comfortable despite the lack of post-1990 C

People care about time, not cycles, and chances are with whatever crystal is running your AVR, you will still not be comfortable despite the lack of post-1990 CPU features in ATmegas. And finally, the idea of tight loops engineered to cycle precision is dying a slow death in general. You just smother the hard timing requirements with excess frequency and performance. Curious thing about the ESP8266: it doesn't use ARM or any of the other popular kids on the block but a Tensilica Xtensa architecture.