In one instruction the microcontroller can do quite a lot. The basic structure is:
operation value1/address1 value2/address2 destinationaddress
And if you pick a special address as your destination, you can do special things, e.g. skip the next instruction if your result is zero. All in 5 ticks!
And it comes with an assembler too. It's written in Python and makes programming very easy. This is a program to flash a led:
define ledport PORTB
label: main
copy l0 ledport
copy l1 ledport
setPC main