Division

Occasionally, I like to peruse uops.info. It is a great resource for micro-optimization: benchmark every x86 instruction on every architecture, and compile the results. Every time I look at this table, there is one thing that sticks out to me: the DIV instruction. On a Coffee Lake CPU, an 8-bit DIV takes a long time: 25 cycles. Cannon Lake and Ice Lake do a lot better, and so does AMD. We know that divider architecture is different between architectures, and aggregating all of the performance numbers for an 8-bit DIV, we see: