[astrange]

> I'm curious (I know very little about assembly or what's on the CPU so pardon me if what I'm asking makes no sense), what's the benefit of having a whole instruction that both multiplies and adds?

It's still commonly said that RISC processors are faster than CISC because they are "reduced", as in they have fewer instructions. But really it's very beneficial to add instructions that do a lot, if it's something that can easily be done in hardware and replaces several simpler ones.

Multiply-add is an example of one; others are bitfield extraction and rotation, SIMD shuffle, AES encryption, and some of the complex memory operands x86 and ARM have. I even still think x86's memcpy instruction is a good idea.