In the days before computers usually used off-the-shelf CPU chips, people who needed a CPU often used something called “bitslice.” The idea was to have a building block chip that needed some ...

Operating systems are great things to have for general purpose computing, but sometimes they can just get in the way. There’s RAM overhead and processor cycles required for all that operating, after ...

Programming in assembly language -- getting down to the direct manipulation of bytes and even bits -- is gaining in popularity, according the latest ranking by TIOBE, apparently spurred by the ...

An assembler is a type of computer program that takes in basic instructions and converts them into a pattern of bits that the computer's processor can use to perform basic operations. The assembler's ...

Once we’ve built a computer, the next step is to develop an assembly language and then an assembler that can assemble our programs. In my previous column, we introduced the concept of the big-endian ...

First, architecture basics are detailed with information on the register sets, data types, and memory and instruction formats. Next, instruction set extensions are detailed, which include Intel® ...

A programming language that is one step away from machine language. Each assembly language statement is translated into a machine instruction by the assembler. Programmers must be well versed in the ...