I'm basing my comment on my own, admittedly limited, experience. It is a generalization, however, and there may, in fact, be exceptions. I just haven't encountered them ... yet.

I wasn't referring to bit operations, if you noticed, I was referring to multi-bit operations as one might handle with the instruction to which I referred. There's nothing new about that. If you have an 8-bit parameter, possibly an input byte from a port, you have to isolate those bits from the rest of the long-word in many cases. Bit-wise operations are different, of course. If, for example, you're looking at a byte on an 8-bit device, and using a table to interpret it, indeed, a common operation in the 8-bit MCU world, it takes time to isolate the byte. That step can be skipped in byte-wide architectures, hence, saves time and code. This became apparent 30 years ago with the MC68000 family, and hasn't really changed much.

It's true that there's no one-size-fits-all solution to the wide range of problems MCU's deal with every day, but some operations do seem to work better, if that's a reasonable term, on some than on others. I agree that specifics of the task and of the MCU must be considered carefully before making a choice.

RE