I’m not debating whether or not its a worthy endeavour though, I’m only saying that you can’t expect good performance out of assembly code unless you practice writing high performance assembly code. Most of us have a lot of experience with high level languages, so that we can write well performing high level code makes a lot of sense, but we shouldn’t expect that we can just “drop down to assembly” and get a performance boost, but that also doesn’t mean that its never possible, for the people who do actually do this a lot (eg the x264 people writing hand crafted SSE/AVX code)
Which is only a tiny subset of all the opcodes that a modern Intel CPU is able to understand, let alone what AMD also offers.
You need tools like VTune from each CPU vendor to actually understand the CPU clock timings of each opcode in micro-ops (microcode execution unit).
While you can master a specific subset, like knowing AVX instructions, mastering Assembly back to back like in the old days, only when writing Assembly for stuff like small PIC microcontrollers.
Trying to master a language like C++ is easier, which says a lot about how modern CPUs look like.
