Say hello to x86_64 Assembly, Part 5

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22 points·0xAX··8 comments

I had assembly @uni, but never had the guts to try and make something [useful] with it -> what keeps hanging in my head is, assembly is only good/usefule for compiler builders.

Is learning x86 your main goal, or do you plan to..??

No it's not main main goal, my main goal is learning CPU, operating systems, bootloaders and etc...

Yes ok, so learning is your main goal :) thats perfectly fine.

(some nice info, for the bigger picture in that case http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/how-computers-boot-up/ )

Yes i know abot this blog, really great artucles. Reading and trying to understand linux kernel source code too and planing to write series of blog posts about it after assembly

Sometimes compilers fail us, in particular they often fail to correctly vectorize code. If you do it manually insert the correct instructions you can get a 20% speedup!

Sometimes you get 40x speedup. Sometimes you gain nothing.

It's very useful if you need to get all the performance out of the CPU. Compilers are good for generating code for 10 year old CPUs. It's usually pretty trivial to get 2x improvement.

That said, typically you shouldn't bother.

Ow man! Assembly! I spent a quarter creating a calculator (only calculating 2*9).

But O boy I learned about computer architecture a lot, just a lot about Flow of logic + OS systems.

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