> it allows you to write new intrinsics I admit that it gets very close, however I think compiler provided intrinsics can be and are optimized more than ones t

> it allows you to write new intrinsics I admit that it gets very close, however I think compiler provided intrinsics can be and are optimized more than ones that are implemented with inline asm, as the compiler knows about the semantics of the instruction for such an intrinsic, and not much about an inline asm one, apart from inputs/outputs/clobbers. Having said that I agree that inline asm is very useful for instructions that the compiler does not know about.