Architectures

Unlike most languages, assembly is specific to a given architecture, with the following caveats:

  1. Many architectures have instructions which are similar, such as mov
  2. Some architectures are backwards compatible, e.g. amd64 will generally run x86 instructions

Whilst individual processors within the x86 and amd64 families do not differ greatly, this is less the case for ARM.

The architectures covered on this site are:

Names Notes
x86 Usually refers to the 32 bit instruction set, minimum 386
x86_64, amd64 64 bit successor to x86, amd64 refers to the fact that AMD produced a 64 bit ISA first, as Intel was going down the IA-64 path
arm, armhf, armel 32 bit ARM, with slight differences - armhf has hardware support for floating point (hf) and is ARMv7 onwards
arm64, AArch64 64 bit ARM (ARMv8)