When is assembly faster than C?

Question

One of the stated reasons for knowing assembler is that, on occasion, it can be employed to write code that will be more performant than writing that code in a higher-level

Answer 1

The simple answer... One who knows assembly well (aka has the reference beside him, and is taking advantage of every little processor cache and pipeline feature etc) is guaranteed to be capable of producing much faster code than any compiler.

However the difference these days just doesn't matter in the typical application.