Book Image

Mastering Assembly Programming

By : Alexey Lyashko
3 (1)
Book Image

Mastering Assembly Programming

3 (1)
By: Alexey Lyashko

Overview of this book

The Assembly language is the lowest level human readable programming language on any platform. Knowing the way things are on the Assembly level will help developers design their code in a much more elegant and efficient way. It may be produced by compiling source code from a high-level programming language (such as C/C++) but can also be written from scratch. Assembly code can be converted to machine code using an assembler. The first section of the book starts with setting up the development environment on Windows and Linux, mentioning most common toolchains. The reader is led through the basic structure of CPU and memory, and is presented the most important Assembly instructions through examples for both Windows and Linux, 32 and 64 bits. Then the reader would understand how high level languages are translated into Assembly and then compiled into object code. Finally we will cover patching existing code, either legacy code without sources or a running code in same or remote process.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Intel Architecture

Summary

The example code in this chapter was designed for the demonstration of the parallel data processing capabilities of modern Intel-based processors. Of course, the technology being used herein is far from able to provide the power of architectures such as CUDA, but it is definitely able to significantly speed up certain algorithms. While the algorithm we worked on here is very simple and hardly requires any optimization at all, as it could be implemented with FPU instructions alone and we would hardly notice any difference, it still illustrates the way in which multiple data may be processed simultaneously. A much better application could be solving an n-body problem, as SSE allows simultaneous computation of all vectors in a 3 dimensional space or even the implementation of a multilayer perceptron (one of many types of artificial neural networks) as it could have made it...