I expect most people will use boost::chrono::steady_clock to measure performance. I've been considering switching from my raw calls to the Windows peformance counter APIs to the steady_clock. I'm a little worried about the overhead of what should be a non-intrusive facility. In examing the source, I see that steady_clock::now() reads the performance counter and then multiplies it by the reciprocal of the counter's frequency (acquired on first use of the clock) to return the time in nanoseconds. How expensive is this 64 bit multiply on a 32 bit system? How hard would it be to have now() return a time_point that stores the raw tick value and only converts it to nanoseconds when a calculation in real units is required? (Comparison to another time_point could still be done in performance counter ticks, saving the multiply.) Is it worth the extra complexity to demand-convert ticks to nanoseconds? Source is in boost_1_48_0\boost\chrono\detail\inlined\win\chrono.cpp