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Understanding the x86's Decimal Adjust after Addition (DAA) instruction

Accepted submission by owl at 2023-01-30 18:29:21
Hardware
https://www.righto.com/2023/01/understanding-x86s-decimal-adjust-after.html [righto.com]

I've been looking at the DAA machine instruction on x86 processors, a special instruction for binary-coded decimal arithmetic. Intel's manuals document each instruction in detail, but the DAA description doesn't make much sense. I ran an extensive assembly-language test of DAA on a real machine to determine exactly how the instruction behaves. In this blog post, I explain how the instruction works, in case anyone wants a better understanding.


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