If you want to get the ultimate performance out of a processor, understanding assembly is paramount. Writing it by hand is less critical today than it was in th

If you want to get the ultimate performance out of a processor, understanding assembly is paramount. Writing it by hand is less critical today than it was in the days of old 8- and 16-bit CPUs when memory was at a premium, instruction cycle counts were known constants, and sequential execution was guaranteed. But being able to read your compiler's output and understand what the optimizer does is a huge performance win.