Overview Why you should care about the ISA Instruction sets in the Arm architecture Instruction set resources Simple sequential execution Registers in AArch64 - general-purpose registers Registers in AArch64 - other registers Registers in AArch64 - system registers Data processing - arithmetic and logic operations Data processing - floating point Data processing - bit manipulation Data processing - extension and saturation Data processing - format conversion Data processing - vector data Loads and stores Loads and stores - size Loads and stores - zero and sign extension Loads and stores - addressing Loads and stores - load pair and store pair Loads and stores - using floating point registers Program flow Program flow - loops and decisions Program flow - generating condition code Program flow - conditional select instructions Function calls Procedure Call Standard System calls Check your knowledge Related information Next steps
Why you should care about the ISA
As developers, you may not need to write directly in assembler in our day-to-day role. However, assembler is still important in some areas, such as the first stage boot software or some low-level kernel activities.
Even if you are not writing assembly code directly, understanding what the instruction set can do, and how the compiler makes use of those instructions, can help you to write more efficient code. It can also help you to understand the output of the compiler. This can be useful when debugging.