Yes, and for Ice Lake they're introducing the yes-this-time-we-really-mean-it-fast-rep-mov, er, "fast short rep movs". Time will tell whether it beats a softwar

Yes, and for Ice Lake they're introducing the yes-this-time-we-really-mean-it-fast-rep-mov, er, "fast short rep movs". Time will tell whether it beats a software implementation. But my point still stands, if you're developing a new ISA, does it really make sense to add dedicated string copy instructions, using opcode space, adding die area for microcode ROM's, design and verification costs etc., considering that even Intel with all their money can't make them an obvious win compared to a software implementation? But yes, both for x86 and RISC architectures, it's probably unwise to optimize memcpy() implementations by staring at microbenchmarks that do nothing else than memcpy() of different sizes, thus ignoring the I$ pollution that a monster implementation causes.