Chapter 1. Introduction

When the processor manufacturer Intel is mentioned, two 64-bit processors come to mind: EM64T and the Itanium. For AMD: the AMD64. Non-80×86 manufacturers discovered years ago that competing against an established desktop market is difficult to impossible. The key to successful market injection is being able to run a large quantity of pre-existing applications. Intel and AMD have built their business upon this by periodically creating superset instruction sets for their 80×86 processors so that pre-existing software still runs on the new equipment and new software can be written for the new equipment.

The technology has been forked into two 64-bit paths. One uses the Itanium-based platform with a new 64-bit primary instruction ...

Get 32/64-Bit 80x86 Assembly Language Architecture now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.