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by st_goliath 145 days ago
Fun little tidbit: The 0x40-0x4f range used for the REX prefix actually clashes with the single-byte encodings for increment/decrement.

When AMD designed the 64 bit extension, they had run out of available single-byte opcodes to use as a prefix and decided to re-use those. The INC/DEC instructions are still available in 64 bit mode, but not in their single-byte encodings.
2 comments
TheAdamist 145 days ago
Which clever code can utilize to determine which mode its running in and branch appropriately depending if the inc/dec were executed or not.
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adgjlsfhk1 144 days ago
It is still crazy to me that intel though having 2 1 byte instructions for something that could just be coded as a single add with immediate instruction (which they had anyway).
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