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• This guide should give you enough background to read andunderstand (most) of the 64bit x86 assembly that gcc is likely to produce.
• x86 is apoorly-designed ISA. It’s a mess, but it is the most widely used ISA in theworld today.
• Itbreaks almost every rule of good ISA design
• Justbecause it is popular does not mean it’s good
• Inteland AMD have managed to engineer (at considerable cost) their CPUs so that thisugliness has relatively little impact on their processors’ design (more on thislater)
• There’sa nice example