The example I gave, yes. No assembler code can have anything to do with micro-ops; they're implementation specific. On x86, a lot of instructions are close mat

The example I gave, yes. No assembler code can have anything to do with micro-ops; they're implementation specific. On x86, a lot of instructions are close matches, yet some are removed entirely (say "xor eax, eax") or fused into one micro-op, (like "cmp #123, eax / je <address>"). Future CPUs might even do some data flow analysis to optimize code even further. Say speculative "constant" folding based on runtime profile to remove chunks of code from hot inner loops. Or to replace longer instruction patterns with HW optimized implementation, if that's what it takes to get some extra performance for the next year's model. https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/macro-operation_fusion https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/macro-operation_fusion