x86 Assembly Language Part-I

Welcome to the chapter on x86 assembly languages. So, as we shall see x86 is just not one assembly language, it's a family of assembly languages. They're used by the Intel and AMD processors, which at least as of 2016 dominate the laptop, the desktop, and the server processor markets. So, these slides are for chapter five in

the book Computer Organization and Architecture published by McGraw Hill in 2015. Uh the book uh should be available in almost all geographies around the world. You can always let the author or the publisher know if a book is not available in a certain geography. So, let's come to this very interesting family of ISAs.

So, the first point is that it's actually not one ISA. It is a family of ISAs, but all of them end with 86. So, that's the reason it's x86, where x can mean a lot of things. So, the great grandfather in the family is the 8-bit 8080 microprocessor used in the mid-70s. And say, the 8080 microprocessor used to

have an assembly language of its own. It was an 8-bit processor. The grandfather is the 16-bit 8086 microprocessor. Which uh was released in 1978. And for those days, it was a fairly revolutionary microprocessor because 16-bit was also rare in those days. And uh the microprocessor pretty much started the era of microprocessors and gradually

large uh server computers started being built of much smaller microprocessors. So, the parents in this generation are the 32-bit processors. Namely, 80386, 80486. Pentium 1 till Pentium 4. So, all of these uh processors used to dominate in the '90s and early 2000. So, so pretty much for 20 years, uh these processors dominated.