x86 Calculating AX given AH and AL?

Solution 1:

As suggested by Peter Cordes, I would imagine the data as hexadecimal values:

RR RR RR RR EE EE HH LL
|           |     || ||
|           |     || AL
|           |     AH  |
|           |     |___|
|           |     AX  |
|           |_________|
|           EAX       |
|_____________________|
RAX

...where RAX is the 64-bit register which exists in x86-64.

So if you had AH = 0x12 and AL = 0x34, like this:

00 00 00 00 00 00 12 34
|           |     || ||
|           |     || AL
|           |     AH  |
|           |     |___|
|           |     AX  |
|           |_________|
|           EAX       |
|_____________________|
RAX

...then you had AX = 0x1234 and EAX = 0x00001234 etc.

Note that, as shown in this chart, AH is the only "weird" register here which is not aligned with the lower bits. The others (AL, AX, EAX, RAX for 64-bit) are just different sizes but all aligned on the right. (For example, the two bytes marked EE EE in the chart don't have a register name on their own.)

Writing AL, AH, or AX merge into the full RAX, leaving other bytes unmodified for historical reasons. (Prefer a movzx eax, byte [mem] or movzx eax, word [mem] load if you don't specifically want this merging: Why doesn't GCC use partial registers?)

Writing EAX zero-extends into RAX. (Why do x86-64 instructions on 32-bit registers zero the upper part of the full 64-bit register?)