User Guide

Preface xvii
24592—Rev. 3.15—November 2009 AMD64 Technology
Preface
About This Book
This book is part of a multivolume work entitled the AMD64 Architecture Programmer’s Manual. This
table lists each volume and its order number.
Audience
This volume ( Volume 1) is intended for programmers writing application programs, compilers, or
assemblers. It assumes prior experience in microprocessor programming, although it does not assume
prior experience with the legacy x86 or AMD64 microprocessor architecture.
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.
System-programming topics—including the use of instructions running at a current privilege level
(CPL) of 0 (most-privileged)—are described in Volume 2. Details about each instruction are described
in volumes 3, 4, and 5.
Organization
This volume begins with an overview of the architecture and its memory organization and is followed
by chapters that describe the four application-programming models available in the AMD64
architecture:
• General-Purpose Programming—This model uses the integer general-purpose registers (GPRs).
The chapter describing it also describes the basic application environment for exceptions, control
transfers, I/O, and memory optimization that applies to all other application-programming models.
Title Order No.
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