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Asked: 2026-06-10T09:21:38+00:00

I’ve read many times over the years that you should do XOR ax, ax

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I’ve read many times over the years that you should do XOR ax, ax because it is faster… or when programming in C use counter++ or counter+=1 because they would INC or ADD… Or that in the Netburst Pentium 4 the INC was slower than ADD 1 so the compiler had to be warned that your target was a Netburst so it would translate all var++ to ADD 1…

My question is: Why INC and ADD have different performances? Why for example INC was claimed to be slower on Netburst while faster than ADD in other processors?

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  1. Editorial Team

    For the x86 architecture, INC updates on a subset of the condition codes, whereas ADD updates the entire set of condition codes. (Other architectures have different rules so this discussion may or may not apply).

    So an INC instruction must wait for other previous instructions that update the condition code bits to finish, before it can modify that previous value to produce its final condition code result.

    ADD can produce final condition code bits without regard to previous values of the condition codes, so it doesn’t need to wait for previous instructions to finish computing their value of the condition codes.

    Consequence: you can execute ADD in parallel with lots of other instructions, and INC with fewer other instructions. Thus, ADD appears to be faster in practice.

    (I believe there is a similar issue with working with 8 bit registers (e.g., AL) in the context of full width registers (e.g., EAX), in that an AL update requires that previous EAX updates complete first).

    I don’t use INC or DEC in my high performance assembly code anymore. If you aren’t ultrasensitive to execution times, then INC or DEC is just fine and can reduce the size of your instruction stream.

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