As a matter of fact, writing C and assembler is what I've been doing the past two years. Indeed I'd just graduated before then, so my experience is still limited. However, I've optimised plenty of code.

Going from C to assembler, I seem to remember cutting down processing time by half, or something around that range. Maybe a bit more in some cases. That's one or two orders of magnitude below what you suggest.

Honestly though, my criticism isn't so much with the numbers as it is with the content of the article. I felt like you spent a lot of time taking about trivialities and hearsay, and not much time developing your argument with facts.

Yes, speed (obviously) matters, power consumption (obviously) matters, and latency (obviously) matters. No one in their right mind would say otherwise. However, so does development time, portability and maintainability. Not all software needs to be written in assembler.

Maybe I'm not the target audience for this article. Still, I feel like you wrote a lot of words to say very little. I'll admit I was rather hostile in my response, and I'm sorry that I was so aggressive. I was simply disappointed with the article.