See my post above. These tricks are still alive in many areas; cost-constrained embedded systems (where people have knife-fights over penny resistors) and very

See my post above. These tricks are still alive in many areas; cost-constrained embedded systems (where people have knife-fights over penny resistors) and very well trafficked code in operating systems or network code (think software TLB refill on the Xbox 360, or fast path TCP). Runtime systems for languages like Java. Oh, lots of places. I'll bet that many high-end routers pay very close attention to instruction clocks on their main datapaths. Optimization is not dead. Pointless optimization should be dead, but isn't.