When I worked for a Japanese optical company, we had a Japanese engineer, who was a whiz. I remember him coming over from Japan, and fixing some really hairy communication bus issues. He actually quit the company, a bit after that, at a very young age, and was hired back as a contractor; which was unheard of, in those days.
He was still working for them, as a remote contractor, at least 25 years later. He was always on the “tiger teams.”
He did awesome assembly. I remember when the PowerPC came out, and “Assembly Considered Harmful,” was the conventional wisdom, because of pipelining, out-of-order instructions, and precaching, and all that.
His assembly consistently blew the doors off anything the compiler did. Like, by orders of magnitude.
Mediocre ones … maybe not so much.
When I worked for a Japanese optical company, we had a Japanese engineer, who was a whiz. I remember him coming over from Japan, and fixing some really hairy communication bus issues. He actually quit the company, a bit after that, at a very young age, and was hired back as a contractor; which was unheard of, in those days.
He was still working for them, as a remote contractor, at least 25 years later. He was always on the “tiger teams.”
He did awesome assembly. I remember when the PowerPC came out, and “Assembly Considered Harmful,” was the conventional wisdom, because of pipelining, out-of-order instructions, and precaching, and all that.
His assembly consistently blew the doors off anything the compiler did. Like, by orders of magnitude.