Personally I felt beaten the compiler with the advent of superstar CPU (around mid 90s for x86) Pentium P5, AMD K6 and the like. In some particular loops some

Personally I felt beaten the compiler with the advent of superstar CPU (around mid 90s for x86) Pentium P5, AMD K6 and the like. In some particular loops some hand written assembly is bound to outperform C code but overall it's an uphill fruitless battle.