Programming with 64-Bit ARM Assembly Language

Introduction

My first book on Assembly Language is Raspberry Pi Assembly Language Programming which is all about ARM 32-Bit Assembly Language Programming. This is since the official variant of Linux for the Raspberry Pi, Raspbian is 32-bit. There are good reasons for this, the most important being that until the Raspberry Pi 4, the maximum memory was 1Gig which isn’t enough to properly run a 64-bit version of Linux. Yes you can do it, but it’s rather painful.

Now with the Raspberry Pi 4 supporting 4Gig of RAM and other SBC’s like the nVidia Jetson Nano also containing 4Gig of RAM, running 64-bit operating systems makes a lot more sense. Further in the ARM world, all phones and tablets have moved to 64-bits. All Apple products are 64-bit and all but the very cheapest Android phones are 64-bit.

Hence I felt it made sense to create a 64-bit version of my book and my publisher Apress agreed. This resulted in my newest book: Programming with 64-Bit ARM Assembly Language.

Beyond the Raspberry Pi

Along with teaching how to program 64-bit ARM Assembly Language, the book goes beyond the Raspberry Pi to cover how to add Assembly Language routines to your Apple iOS or Google Android Apps. Every App developer is struggling to get their App noticed out of the millions of Apps in the App stores. Having better performance is one great way for users to recommend your App to their friends.

The book also covers how to write Assembly Language for ARM 64-Bit Linux including Ubuntu as included with the nVidia Jetson Nano or Kali Linux running on a Raspberry Pi 4. Further the book covers how to cross compile your code, compile/assemble it on a powerful Intel/AMD computer and then run it on your target device.

There is a lot of interest in IoT and embedded devices these days. Often these are based on ARM processors and often you need to do some Assembly Language programming to write the device drivers for the various custom pieces of hardware you are developing.

About ARM 64-Bit Assembly Language

When ARM developed the 64-bit version of their processor, they took the time to fix many problems that have developed over the years in the 32-bit versions. The Assembly Language syntax is more streamlined and a lot of little used features like conditional instructions were removed entirely. As a consequence this new book is a complete rewrite. Although anyone familiar with 32-bit ARM Assembly should find 64-bit Assembly familiar, there are a lot of differences and improvements, such as doubling the number of registers.

With the new book you learn how to utilize all the new features that are now available to you. How the instruction syntax is much more uniform across all the coprocessors and how to use all the new registers you have at your disposal.

The newest generations of the ARM processor all have deep execution pipelines and multiple cores. The new 64-bit instruction set is the foundation that allows the ARM processor to fully exploit these features and get the best performance for the smallest amount of power usage.

Where to Buy

With Covid-19, things are moving a bit slower than normal. The ePub versions of my book are available now from Apress directly. This should flow to all the other retailers shortly, in the meantime they have the book available for presale. The print version is in process, but I’m not sure how long it will take this time around. Here are some sample places where it is listed:

• Apress.com
• Amazon.com
• Amazon.ca
• Barnes & Noble
• Chapters Indigo

Over the coming weeks, it’ll change from pre-release to shipping now.

Summary

If you are interested in learning 64-Bit ARM Assembly Language, either to optimize your programs or to learn about the architecture of a modern RISC processor then this book is for you. I hope this book motivates people to use more Assembly Language in their work to produce high performance applications. When people are surveyed for their favorite features in applications, better performance is always top of the list.