What is the fastest/most efficient way to find the highest set bit (msb) in an integer in C?

Question

If I have some integer n, and I want to know the position of the most significant bit (that is, if the least significant bit is on the right, I want to know the position of

Answer 1

Expanding on Josh's benchmark... one can improve the clz as follows

/***************** clz2 ********************/

#define NUM_OF_HIGHESTBITclz2(a) ((a)                              \
                  ? (((1U) << (sizeof(unsigned)*8-1)) >> __builtin_clz(a)) \
                  : 0)

Regarding the asm: note that there are bsr and bsrl (this is the "long" version). the normal one might be a bit faster.