x86 MUL Instruction from VS 2008/2010

Question

Will modern (2008/2010) incantations of Visual Studio or Visual C++ Express produce x86 MUL instructions (unsigned multiply) in the compiled code? I cannot seem to find or

Answer 1

My intuition tells me that the compiler chose IMUL arbitrarily (or whichever was faster of the two) since the bits will be the same whether it uses unsigned MUL or signed IMUL. Any 32-bit integer multiplication will be 64-bits spanning two registers, EDX:EAX. The overflow goes into EDX which is essentially ignored since we only care about the 32-bit result in EAX. Using IMUL will sign-extend into EDX as necessary but again, we don't care since we're only interested in the 32-bit result.