Even with native ops for sqrt you can still write functions to do it faster if you're willing to sacrifice precision, which is what the famous Carmack hack is all about. This is also providing you're square rooting numbers that don't have precalculated answers (I've heard rumour of some sqrt functions doing this kind of thing. Not sure which.). Square rooting, no matter how fancy your instruction set, is as far as I know always going to be more computationally expensive than approximation of the square root no? There's a few ways to do it; Bakhsali Approximation, Babylonian Method, Newton's method. Is there any way that a sqrt op code that provides absolute precision could be faster than these methods?