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> I keep hearing this, and I don't buy it. Did you know that `gcc -O3` will turn `int add(int x, int y) { return a + b; }` into an `lea` instruction? I doubt many people do.

Uh. That's a pretty obvious one.

Sometimes using address generation ports is preferable to ALU ports.

Also 'lea' can load the result in a different register from both operands, 'add' will always need to modify a register.

People have been using 'lea' for calculations since dawn of time, for example:

  shl ebx, 6
  lea edi, [ebx*4 + ebx + 0xa0000]
  add edi, eax

== y * 320 + x + framebuffer address.

This was a common way in DOS days for calculating pixel address in mode 0x13.