Page "Michael Abrash" Paragraph 8

Much of the content of Zen of Assembly Language was updated in Zen of Code Optimization: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Software That Pushes PCs to the Limit ( 1994 ), along with new material.

The presentation of stepwise program refinement empirically demonstrated how algorithm re-design could improve performance up to a factor of 100.

Assembly language re-coding, on the other hand, may only improve performance by a factor of 10.

Abrash also showed how elusive performance improvement can be.

Simply improving performance in one subroutine would expose bottlenecks in other routines and so on.

Finally, he demonstrated processor-dependent assembly-based performance improvements by comparing assembly language optimizations across x86 family members.