[bluGill]

Everything used to be, one of the reasons for CISC instruction sets is the complex instructions do many things at once, which is very convenient for programmers. An assembly instruction becomes more like a function call that does several low level things. Sure CISC assembly is more complex, but if your are an experience programmer those complex instructions do things that you find very useful and make your program more maintainable. Part of the problem with modern assembly is new instructions have been shoe-horned into existing CPU designs instead of elegantly designed in from scratch, the fact that they had to fit those instructions in meant that compromises had to be made.

Today there is no point. Optimizing compilers have gotten very good, and while it is still possible for hand tuned assembly to beat compiled code, with compiled code you change a flag and your code is optimized better for some other CPU that the hand tuned code for a different but compatible CPU. Then change a flag again and your code runs on a completely unrelated CPU family.