[mgraczyk]

At the risk of being pointlessly pedantic: assembly is surely not the lowest level relevant to the topic at hand. When programming for very high performance, you usually need to consider the microarchitecture you are targeting.

[gcr]

Hmm. Most "super-high-performance" projects I've seen find they can get more bang for the buck by switching to a different microarchitecture (FPGA etc) or exploiting parallelism (buy ten computers), not so much optimizing the machine code.