When it comes to IA64, the good news is that we don't have to necessarily learn a whole new instruction set. The downside to that is that we may have to remember some of the slight changes we make to some of the instructions we know and love, especially with the legacy 8-bit high registers and 8-bit low registers we mentioned in the previous recipe.

We also have more registers at our disposal to hold data, and each register can hold more data than it can in IA32. This is all something to keep in mind as we look over some of the common instructions in IA64 and compare them to what we learned about in the IA32 recipe earlier in this chapter.

For this recipe, we will familiarize ourselves with using instructions we've already learned but with our new registers and their new bit width. We will also cover some important labeling options and some of the jump instructions. We won't cover all of the instructions that are available as that would be out of scope for this book.