Oh yes they do. A really excellent example here are ARX (add rotate xor) algorithms in cryptography. Take BLAKE2 for example; the reference C code, compiled to

Oh yes they do. A really excellent example here are ARX (add rotate xor) algorithms in cryptography. Take BLAKE2 for example; the reference C code, compiled to plain x86-64 assembly mainly consists of long rows of addq/xorq/rorq instructions. A modern CPU manages to schedule these so efficiently that the performance difference to a hand-coded SSE or AVX version practically never matters. If you take a peek at Haswell's port map (eg. http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/intel/Haswell/Architecture/haswellexec.png http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/intel/Haswell/Archit... ) you'll see that there are four out of eight ports who can do integer arx operations. Since memory and addr ops got their own ports this means that even the straight addq/xorq/rorq code can almost fully utilize the core. This is no accident, though, the algorithm was designed to take advantage of designs like this :)