Since we're experts on IA32 at this point—and hopefully, you can detect the intended humor in that remark—let's work through some of the new functionality of IA64, some of the challenges of moving into this architecture compared to what we just learned in IA32, and some of the added benefits.

It should be clear that moving to IA64 should provide us with the ability to accomplish operations using wider data. After all, instead of adhering to the limits of 32 bits, we have a whole 64 bits at our disposal in our assembly code. Registers will hold double the amount of data, and there are even additional registers we can use for our coding needs. This is an exciting world we are about to enter and I seriously hope you enjoy some of the upgrades we'll learn about in the IA64 recipes in this chapter.

Since we've covered the 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit registers already, moving on to the 64-bit registers should go smoothly. This is because all of those smaller registers are still present in the 64-bit world, and we can still use them in the same way! Well, we can use them in mostly the same way—but more on that later. In this recipe, we'll dive into the 64-bit registers similar to how we learned about the 32-bit registers in the previous chapter.