What is hand-coded assembly language used for these days?
chadaustin: IMVU hand-rolled its SSE skinning loops and parts of the software 3D lighting code, because only 2/3 of our customers have GPUs.  We need to run well on five-year-old Dells with Intel graphics.  (Direct3D on Intel isn't as good as a dedicated software renderer.  We chose RAD's Pixomatic.)In addition, look at how popular netbooks are becoming.  The Intel Atom is an in-order CPU.  Imagine a hyperthreaded, 1.6 GHz 486...On the iPhone it's even worse.  It's got a decent vector unit, but the CPU is very slow.  You'll see great wins by doing your 3D math yourself.As we continue to become multicore, I could imagine somebody shaving a couple cycles out of the core message passing routines, though you're almost certainly bus bound in those situations...Computers are getting smaller and people want more out of them; assembly language is back in style!