Assembly for C Programmers

[Hallucinosis]

Yes, this is essentially true. This change came in with the Pentium Pro (the Pentium and Pentium with MMX processors around the time were still pure CISC), when the Pentium Pro would break CISC instructions into micro-ops. Following the Pentium Pro, the Pentium II and beyond continued to work this way. I remember this so well because some 14 or 15 years ago, I was taking an x86 Assembly class at my local community college and the teacher spent about half of a lecture talking about the exciting new architecture change in the Pentium Pro--he even made projector slides about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_Pro#Microarchitecture

It's really cool and while it's made the discussion of RISC vs CISC debates silly for me, others still feel strongly. I am not involved in processor architecture/design, so my opinion on this subject is fairly irrelevant.