> In fact, we would argue that the study of assembly language is extremely important to the building of competent software engineers. Further, we would argue that teaching the x86 instruction set is cruel as that ISA was born in the 1970s and has simply gotten more muddled with age.

> The MIPS instruction set is another ISA that is often covered in College level courses. While kinder and gentler than the x86 ISA, the MIPS processor isn't nearly as relevant as the ARM family.

I disagree. My university taught me MIPS assembly and its only utility has been in enabling me to understand x86_64 assembly poorly. When I look at the disassembly of my code, it is in x86_64 assembly, yet I realized yesterday that I have no clue what the difference is between signed and unsigned subtraction on x86_64. Had that been covered in my university class, I would not be in a position where I need to reverse engineer how that works by working out the math based on the very succinct documentation.

I only recently dabbled with aarch64 and POWER9 because I felt inspired to try to make ZFS' fletcher4 checksum algorithm run faster on various architectures. I had no success on POWER9 due to the Talos II workstation being severely memory bandwidth limited, but had fairly good success on x86_64 and aarch64, although the PRs with that code are still works in progress.

A guide for NEON and SVE would be great, since that is the only aspect of the aarch64 assembly that I did not understand well enough to muddle through it in my recent fletcher4 adventures, but that does not appear to be here. Thankfully, Clang did an awesome job compiling GNU C dialect vector extensions into efficient, easy to understand NEON assembly (even if I had no clue about the notation used for registers), so I did not need to learn the syntax.

For students, I would suggest learning x86_64, since that is what they are going to be using and if they can learn that, they can learn just about any assembly language (although the RISC-V Vector Extension might pose some trouble). The broader industry shift from x86_64 to aarch64 is still years away and ARM seems determined to kill it before it is here by suing Qualcomm for wanting to build ARM processors under the license they already paid ARM to give them. ARM can say whatever they want in court, but at the end of the day, ARM IP now looks toxic. I hope RISC-V can take the baton from aarch64. It could very well be our only hope for a x86_64-free future given ARM's major strategic mistake.