PDF document. AMD64 Architecture Programmer’s Manual, Volume 3: General-Purpose and System Instructions. 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 ( Volume 3 ) is intended for all programmers writing application or system software for a processor that implements the AMD64 architecture. Descriptions of general-purpose instructions assume an understanding of the application-level programming topics described in Volume 1. Descriptions of system instructions assume an understanding of the system-level programming topics described in Volume 2. Volumes 3, 4, and 5 describe the AMD64 architecture’s instruction set in detail. Together, they cover each instruction’s mnemonic syntax, opcodes, functions, affected flags, and possible exceptions. The AMD64 instruction set is divided into five subsets: General-purpose instructions, System instructions, 128-bit media instructions ( instructions that use the 128-bit XMM registers ), 64-bit media instructions ( instructions that use the 64-bit MMX registers ), x87 floating-point instructions.

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