alt Hacker NewsNot going to dismiss it, but I did try to not do stupid stuff. I used QueryPerformanceCounter outside the loop, pinned the benchmark thread to a single core, and the array of elements it processed was fairly large. So I don't think overhead and throttling was an issue. The measurements were very consistent and repeatable.
Fair enough, I've only really ever found assembly level optimization on embedded microcontrollers to make any degree of sense. Performance optimization usually means something along the lines of "convince co-workers not to implement their own bubble sort" in my lines of work