Beginning x64 Assembly Programming: From Novice to AVX Professional

© Jo Van Hoey 2019

J. Van HoeyBeginning x64 Assembly Programminghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5076-1_8

8. Memory

Jo Van Hoey¹ 

(1)

Hamme, Belgium

 

Memory is used by the processor as a storage room for data and instructions. We have already discussed registers, which are high-speed access storage places. Accessing memory is a lot slower than accessing registers. But the number of registers is limited. The memory size has a theoretical limit of 2⁶⁴ addresses, which is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616, or 16 exabytes. You cannot use that much memory because of practical design issues! It is time to investigate memory in more detail.

Exploring Memory

Listing 8-1 shows an example we will use during our discussion of memory.

; memory.asm

section .data

      bNum        db    123 ...