Ask HN: Which processor to pick for learning assembly? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which processor to pick for learning assembly?

I am doing a course on Computer Organization and Architecture from YT. And following John P Hayes's textbook. I think programming things could help me up.

PS: I saw that there are courses on udemy regarding CPU design. And I am planning to take that course as well.

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We use ARM in our computer organization classes. It's more accessible than x86 and allows you to get a feel for the important concepts of assembly: register-to-register operations, conditional branching, and how the stack is used to manage function calls and returns.

I like the CPUlator as a platform. It lets you step through the program one instruction at a time and observe all of the registers and memory locations.

https://cpulator.01xz.net/?sys=arm

This set of lessons is a good starting point:

https://thinkingeek.com/series/arm-assembler-raspberry-pi/

My course repository has several example programs with explanatory comments:

https://github.com/dansmyers/ComputerOrganizationAndArchitec...

thanks.

Different assembly have different delights:

If you use whatever your computer can execute, it's fun to make actual, real programs for your operating system in assembly. That means likely, x86-64. (Even if you are on ARM, you computer will emulate x86-64 just fine, most likely.)

Or use ARM, if you are on a not-old Mac or whatever.

The simplest architecture which is still 32 bit and has real hardware, is probably MIPS.

If you want to feel what it's like to control a complete system from end-to-end, you could dive into embedded platforms (AVR/ARM), or emulators of classic machines like the Commodore Amiga with the m68k line of processors. It has a sweet-spot in my heart because on the one hand it's modern enough to have great graphics, sound and even network capability, on the other hand it's simple enough to completely understand.

Either way you choose, you'll have great fun.

If your objective is to get a gentile introduction to assembly, with no practical use: PDP-11 (on a simulator) or Motorola 68K. Both are very simple and straight forward. As opposed to many others that seem to live on confusion.

To aid in learning, you can always write in C and then output in assembly. Typically you would turn off optimization. The optimizer will often scramble the results to make it better but harder to read.

Have you thought about the class NAND to Tetris? It builds a tetris game but starts and the gate level.

I suggested x86 because CISC instructions are some of the most powerful, unlike RISC. Although x86 processors emit a lot of heat, they can handle almost any task, and Intel syntax is pretty easy to learn. If you want to say that x86 is difficult, then this is a fatal error. But it is really difficult if you write directly on machine codes (I do this, but rarely). But as a rule, no one does this anymore.

I’d recommend anything that has a practical use.

What is your objective? If it’s just for a hobby, maybe try some old consoles programming, like Gameboy or NES, or NeoGeo if you want something a bit more complicated? Anything 32-bit and above might be too much for a beginner.

I'd probably get a Pi and use ARM. I feel like assembly is more useful on resource constrained systems, which usually means ARM.

pick the platform that is either accessible to you or that you want to develop also other things of.

assembly is a trip into the machine. if the machine is not interesting it'll not be worth it.

there is nothing wrong with diving head first into intel/amd, but its hard.

mips is good to learn if you want to do embedded afaik. arm is used alot in phones. some embedded too

IMHO just use whatever CPU you have available. x86-64, ARM... No need to overthink it.

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