As we repeatedly demonstrate throughout this book, knowing darker corners of the instruction set can be very fruitful, especially in the case of CISC platforms like x86, which currently has somewhere between 1000 and 4000 distinct instructions, depending on how you count.
Most of these instructions are related to arithmetic, and using them all efficiently to optimize arithmetic operations requires a great deal of both knowledge, skill, and creativity. Therefore, in this chapter, we will discuss number representations and their use in numerical algorithms.