With the discussion over x86-64 becoming prevalent now that Intel has decided to adopt it for their Xeon workstation processors, and likely, their desktop equivalents at some point in the future, I figured that it was a good time to go over what this means to the hardware and development communities. We’ll be taking an in depth look at how those pieces of silicon work.
It would be very difficult to explain how Intel’s move truly affects anything without a look back at what an instruction set architecture really means. So that’s where we’ll begin.
Instruction Set Architecture
In the language of computers, the “instruction set” is all the possible words in the dictionary. Of course, to a computer these are all represented by 1’s and 0’s, but we’ll pretend that they’re letters and numbers.
Instructions are the lowest level that can be coded at. In comparison, today’s code, written to be executed in Java or C, is considered high level, as the programmer is not aware of the hardware that this code is being run on. Before 80x86 came along, most programmers were content to write at this base (or low) level. Writing code at the low level means you are moving data along the paths from register to register, and to the functional units of the processor.
Registers are the smallest parts that are “user accessible,” and are nothing more than a really small data storage space. Data must be moved into registers for it to be worked on, since you can’t actually perform an operation on something that is in any of the parts of the storage hierarchy, be it cache, ram, or hard disk. With many instruction sets, hand coding at this level is not too difficult, and ends up being quite efficient. The types of instructions available allow for most math expressions, such as adds, subtractions, multiplies, and divides, as well as control commands such as loads and stores to and from memory, shifting bits within registers, conditional and unconditional branches, and jumps to different places in the program.
The specific instruction set determines what type of machine the processor is. There are two main overall design types, CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer) and RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer).
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