IA32 Registers 

The IA32 started with the 80386 processor, which also boasted a new 32-bit address bus

The Pentium series enhanced performance further by increasing the data bus to 64-bits

IA32 processors kept backward compatibility, i.e. they can still run machine programs written for old 16-bit x86 generations

To use the 32-bit register, on of the following assembler directives has to be specified: .386 or .486 or .586

The following changes were implemented in the IA32 registers:

  1. General Purpose Registers:
    There are 8 data registers now named R0 to R7, shown in Figure 3.2 below

    Eight 64-bit floating-point registers named FP0 to FP7 were added for holding 64-bit floating-point operands (see Figure 3.2)


    Fig. m010330.1 IA32 Data and Floating-point registers



    Registers R0 to R3 are also called EAX, ECX, EDX and EBX, respectively. These are the extended 32-bit version of the old x86 data registers

    The lower 16-bits of these four registers can still be referenced as AX, CX, DX and BX for backward compatibility with the older x86 architecture. Also, the lowest 8-bits can be referenced as AL, CL, DL and BL while bits 9-15 can be referenced as AH, CH, DH and BH. This illustrated in Figure 3.3.



    Fig. m010330.2 The extended IA32 data registers (backward compatibility with the old x86 is shown)



  2. Segment Register:
    Segment registers are still 16-bits wide, i.e. the physical memory can have up to 64K segments

    Two new data segment registers were added; FS and GS. So now a program can reference data in 4 different data segments

    The other segment registers kept their old x86 names (CS, SS, DS and ES). Figure 3.4 shows the IA32 segment registers.



    Fig. m010330.3 The IA32 Segment Registers



  3. Pointer and Index Registers:
    The Instruction Pointer register is now 32-bits wide and addressed as EIP (extended IP) allowing for a code segment size of up to 4G words

    The lower 16-bit of the EIP register are referenced as IP for compatibility with older x86 architecture

    Data registers R4 to R7 can be used as extended pointer and index registers named as; ESP (extended stack pointer), EBP (extended base pointer), ESI (extended source index) and EDI (extended destination index), respectively

    The lower 16-bits of these registers can still be referenced as SP, BP, SI, and DI for compatibility with the older x86 architecture.


  4. Flag Register: This is an extended 32-bit (EFLAGS) register, with the lower 16-bits containing the regular x86 flags. Figure 3.5 below shows the IA32 Pointer, Index and Flags registers.


    Fig. m010330.4 IA32 Pointer, Index and FLAGS registers showing backward compatibility with older X86 architecture