If you want to get technical, modern CPUs can dispatch (begin the execution) of 4 to 6 instructions every clock cycle. However, many instructions take more than

If you want to get technical, modern CPUs can dispatch (begin the execution) of 4 to 6 instructions every clock cycle. However, many instructions take more than one cycle to complete. For instance, integer multiply takes 3-4 cycles on an Intel Sandy Bridge chip. FMUL takes 5 cycles to complete. That being said, there are several instructions, like mov, integer additions and compare, bitwise operations, which can absolutely complete in a single cycle. See this document for more details: http://www.agner.org/optimize/instruction_tables.pdf http://www.agner.org/optimize/instruction_tables.pdf