It's not useless bloat though. It's probably hard to beat in terms of code size, which is often even relevant for performance (due to cache size considerations)

It's not useless bloat though. It's probably hard to beat in terms of code size, which is often even relevant for performance (due to cache size considerations). Furthermore, the article is talking about adding many numbers, which is just one of the possible use cases. As far as I can tell, adc is still useful for adding a pair of 128-bit numbers on a 64-bit CPU for example.