Professional Assembly Language

Chapter 2. The IA-32 Platform

One key to successful assembly language programming is knowing the environment you are programming for. The biggest part of that environment is the processor. Knowing the hardware platform your program will run on is crucial to being able to exploit both basic and advanced functions of the processor. Often, the whole point of using assembly language is to exploit low-level features of the processor within your application program. Knowing what elements can be used to assist your programs in gaining the most speed possible can mean the difference between a fast application and a slow application.

At the time of this writing, the most popular processor platform by far used in workstations and servers is the Intel Pentium family of processors. The hardware and instruction code set designed for the Pentium processors is commonly referred to as the IA-32 platform.

This chapter describes the hardware elements that make up the Intel IA-32 platform. The first part of the chapter describes the basic components found in the IA-32 processor platforms. Then the chapter describes the advanced features found in the newer Pentium 4 processor chips in the IA-32 family. Finally, the different processors that are contained within the IA-32 platform are discussed, showing what features to watch out for with the different types of processors, both from Intel and from other manufacturers.

Core Parts of an IA-32 Processor

While different processor families incorporate different ...