What kind of projects (besides the obvious OS stuff) use assembly language?

Seemingly, no one uses assembly nowadays other than to develop device drivers, or the very core of OS kernels etc. Anyone has knowledge of it being currently used for other things?

I mean PC-style and bigger hardware, not embedded stuff with teeny tiny processors.

I believe that the Folding@Home parallel computing project uses optimized assembly code for maximum speed.*


 * Note: this does not mean assembly is always faster then C/C++.

I know assembly is used for very heavily code for games. For example, pixel shaders have a really tight instruction budget; to get the effects you want, you pretty much have to code down to the metal.

Someone used assembly for this [code golf for changing numbers to words][1].


[1]:

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The last time I came across assembler was when I used to hack the Quake I source code. All the math libraries (especially anything for dot products) were written in MASM by John Carmack. This stuff was floating-point intensive, and at the time C wasn't as good as expertly hand-crafted ASM for floating operations. Also, since computers were far more CPU-limited, and since Quake used the CPU for rendering, every single operation mattered, so ASM worked best.

I think the most prominent programs where assembler is used are boot-loader.