x64 Assembly Language Step-by-Step, 4th Edition

APPENDIX BPartial x64 Instruction Reference

Depending on how you count, the x64 architecture now has more than 1,000 machine instructions. Don't panic: A lot of those machine instructions may be used only by operating systems in protected mode. A large number of them implement floating-point math, which for space reasons I can't cover in this book. A fair number are highly specialized for things such as fast encryption and decryption.

In this appendix, I'll present short summaries of the most common machine instructions, the ones you're most likely to use as a beginner to write userspace programs. If you want a more complete (and completely authoritative) instruction reference, see the Intel instruction set documentation:

https://software.intel.com/en-us/download/intel-64-and-ia-32-architectures-sdm-combined-volumes-1-2a-2b-2c-2d-3a-3b-3c-3d-and-4

Plan to spend a little time with it: The PDF is 5,060 pages long.

Or if that's a triple handful (it is), a useful web distillation of the Intel docs can be found here:

www.felixcloutier.com/x86/index.html

This site basically allows you to click around and find the instructions you're looking for and saves you from having to download and hunt through one gigantic document.

What's Been Removed from x64

During the evolution of the x86 CPUs, instructions have been added and removed with each generation. Most of these are fairly arcane, but there are a few that you may have learned as a beginner in the 32-bit era that are no longer ...