Assembly is the mother language of the processor and in terms of speed , no any other language can beat it. Assembly is ideal for some speed critical tasks.
Hmm, speed - I am not sure that this is still correct. If I look at the specification of a modern Intel CPU, with out of order execution, branch prediction, queues for data and code, L1, L2 and L3 caches and much more. I think today, you must be a very smart assembler programmer to beat with your code an Intel compiler.