We currently emits eax Perhaps this is what we really should generate is Is imull three or four cycles eax eax The current instruction priority is based on pattern complexity The former is more complex because it folds a load so the latter will not be emitted Perhaps we should use AddedComplexity to give LEA32r a higher priority We should always try to match LEA first since the LEA matching code does some estimate to determine whether the match is profitable if we care more about code then imull is better It s two bytes shorter than movl leal On a Pentium M