Atmel AVR Instruction Set - Instruction Timing

Instruction Timing

Arithmetic operations work on registers R0-R31 but not directly on RAM and take one clock cycle, except for multiplication and word-wide addition (ADIW and SBIW) which take two cycles.

RAM and I/O space can be accessed only by copying to or from registers. Indirect access (including optional postincrement, predecrement or constant displacement) is possible through registers X, Y, and Z. All accesses to RAM takes two clock cycles. Moving between registers and I/O is one cycle. Moving eight or sixteen bit data between registers or constant to register is also one cycle. Reading program memory (LPM) takes three cycles.