(09/03/2012 05:10 AM)Tetris999 Wrote:  But also for the "performance" that seems to be the golden land of assembly code

For most cases, if you're thinking about performance, you shouldn't be thinking about assembly.
Compilers are generally pretty good these days, and you probably won't be able to tweak much more performance using assembly over C most of the time.
Also, it's usually the algorithm which plays a MUCH bigger part, not the few clock cycles you can save by writing in assembly.

Knowing the CPU architecture may help with optimising C code, though I'd say this should be more of something you learn later on, not up front.
And for ARM... well, enjoy rewriting your entire program when a new ARM instruction set comes out, or you want to port your stuff to a Cell processor.

Reverse engineering, is kinda less assembly programming and more trying to derive high level concepts from assembly code - so it's a bit different...