Examining code generated by the Visual Studio C++ compiler, part 1 [duplicate]

Answer 1

The reason that the compiler emits this:

LEA EBX,DWORD PTR DS:[EBX]

instead of the semantically equivalent:

NOP
NOP
NOP
NOP
NOP
NOP

..is that it's faster for the processor to execute one 6-byte instruction than six 1-byte instructions. That's all.