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In a program I wrote, 20% of the time is being spent on finding out the minimum of 3 numbers in an inner loop, in this routine: static inline unsigned int min(unsigned int a, unsigned int b, unsigned int c) { unsigned int m = a; if (m > b) m = b; if (m > c) m = c; return m; } Is there any way to speed this up? I am ok with assembly code too for x86/x86_64. Edit: In reply to some of the comments: * Compiler being used is gcc 4.3.3 * As far as assembly is concerned, I am only a beginner there. I asked for assembly here, to learn how to do this. :) * I have a quad-core Intel 64 running, so MMX/SSE etc. are supported. * It's hard to post the loop here, but I can tell you it's a heavily optimized implementation of the levenshtein algorithm. This is what the compiler is giving me for the non-inlined version of min: .globl min .type min, @function min: pushl %ebp movl %esp, %ebp movl 8(%ebp), %edx movl 12(%ebp), %eax movl 16(%ebp), %ecx cmpl %edx, %eax jbe .L2 movl %edx, %eax .L2: cmpl %ecx, %eax jbe .L3 movl %ecx, %eax .L3: popl %ebp ret .size min, .-min .ident "GCC: (Ubuntu 4.3.3-5ubuntu4) 4.3.3" .section .note.GNU-stack,"",@progbits The inlined version is within -O2 optimized code (even my markers mrk = 0xfefefefe, before and after the call to min()) are getting optimized away by gcc, so I couldn't get hold of it. Update: I tested the changes suggested by Nils, ephemient, however there's no perceptible performance boost I get by using the assembly versions of min(). However, I get a 12.5% boost by compiling the program with -march=i686, which I guess is because the whole program is getting the benefits of the new faster instructions that gcc is generating with this option. Thanks for your help guys.

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