Question: How many instructions are executed at once by the CPU?

EDIT by DOS386: split from: http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=10984

Nowadays you can't really know that. Depends on the architechture, the code and today's air pressure.

Lets suppose a Intel PIII and IV, 32bits.

Teehee,

Agner Fog's optimization manuals contain quite detailed information about microarchitecture of Intel, AMD and VIA CPUs. Not an easy reading though, but you'll understand that your question has no real-life meaning even for PPro (if you're not really into spherical horses' races in vacuum ).

IIRC it is currently something like 72. I can't be bothered to look it up to confirm the figure of 72, but basically the CPU can hold many instructions in various stages of completion in various computational units and staging buffers.

To even try to measure, or predict, how much of a piece of code is currently in-flight would be almost impossible without extreme amounts of patience and effort.

so align code (like data [eg. align 4]) makes no sense, right?

Teehee,

Read those optimization manuals. Code alignment may or may not have sense, that depends.