April 2003
Intermediate to advanced
576 pages
15h 13m
English
At the heart of the central processing unit in every computer is the actual calculating component, called the arithmetic and logic unit (ALU). This unit performs both arithmetic and logical operations as required for each opcode encountered. We have split our discussion of the numerous Itanium instructions that operate on integer data across several chapters. We began in Chapter 4 with purely arithmetic instructions and continued in Chapter 5 with instructions that involve logical comparisons based on the numeric values of operands. Computers can also store logical data in their information units. In this section, we discuss a group of instructions that implement logical functions that work directly with such data.