Quote Originally Posted by cairnswm
Anyway - what the heck is a cycle?

That same call took on average: 17798761.20000 cycles
It's a clock cycle of the CPU. A 700MHz CPU has 700 million cycles per second. The RDTSC instruction returns the number of clock cycles that have passed since the computer was turned on. That's why it needs an Int64. If it just used a LongInt it would wrap every few seconds with modern CPU speeds.