PDF document. AMD64 Architecture Tech Docs. The AMD64 architecture is a simple yet powerful 64-bit, backward-compatible extension of the industry-standard ( legacy ) x86 architecture. It adds 64-bit addressing and expands register resources to support higher performance for recompiled 64-bit programs, while supporting legacy 16-bit and 32-bit applications and operating systems without modification or recompilation. The need for a 64-bit x86 architecture is driven by applications that address large amounts of virtual and physical memory, such as high-performance servers, database management systems, and CAD tools. These applications benefit from both 64-bit addresses and an increased number of registers. The small number of registers available in the legacy x86 architecture limits performance in computationintensive applications. Increasing the number of registers provides a performance boost to many such applications. This book is a multivolume work entitled The ( Official ) AMD64 Architecture Programmer’s Manual. This table lists each volume: Volume 1: Application Programming ( 24592 ), Volume 2: System Programming ( 24593 ), Volume 3: General-Purpose and System Instructions ( 24594 ), Volume 4: 128-Bit Media Instructions ( 26568 ), Volume 5: 64-Bit Media and x87 Floating-Point Instructions ( 26569 ). This volume describes the AMD64 architecture’s resources and functions that are accessible to application software, including memory, registers, instructions, operands, I/O facilities, and application-software aspects of control transfers ( including interrupts and exceptions ) and performance optimization.

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