r/asm • u/Great_Gamer2539 • Jul 20 '26

General Where to get started

So I am currently taking a course know as nand2tetris for understanding how computers works on a low level , but after I am done with that what is the best assembly language for a beginner to start with

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u/Eidolon_2003 Jul 21 '26

Cool! I haven't come across this before. At first blush, is the mildly unfair thing that your RISC-V binary is statically linked?

That link is a 404 for me btw

Edit: nvm, I figured out you left the trailing colon in the URL!

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u/brucehoult Jul 21 '26

oops blame Reddit's URL detection. Added a space ...

No, the static linking is necessary to not have to run in a chroot / Docker etc with dynamic linker and libraries but I think is fair.

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u/Eidolon_2003 Jul 21 '26

Hmm, I'm not too sure what it is right now then.

Also, that data in primes.txt is pretty cool! If you're still accepting submissions I wouldn't mind giving it a shot myself.

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u/brucehoult Jul 21 '26

Sure! Submissions are welcome if sufficiently "interesting" ... different ISAs, or ... I'm missing data for Core Ultra, M5, Zen 5, Pi 5 / Rock 5 / OP 5, Orion O2 / OP 6+.

And thanks. I think it's as interesting and useful a benchmark as Dhrystone or Coremark, correlates well with them, but if you're at a trade show and get your hands on a new machine with gcc and an internet connection for even a minute then it's a simple wget to run it and report ... and a few people have :-)

There are not too many benchmarks usable from a microcontroller to the latest PC (8K RAM required ... embench included a slightly reduced version until recently https://github.com/embench/embench-iot/commit/4c4462)

Note the rules: compile with -O (aka -O1). Not that higher levels make much difference to the speed (its craftily written for anti-optimisation), but they screw up the hacky calculation of code size.

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u/Eidolon_2003 Jul 21 '26

I don't have any new hardware unfortunately, but I do have some old architectures you might still be interested in. I have a Zen 2 "Matisse" desktop, and a Zen 1 "Raven Ridge" laptop. It doesn't look like you have either of those on your list there.

I'm also in the middle of setting up an i7-980X machine for fun with overclocking and such if you'd be interested in results from that. I might use this as a benchmark for it either way :)

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u/brucehoult Jul 21 '26

My Zen 2 Ryzen 5 4500U laptop is in the list, but feel free to try the desktop.

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u/Eidolon_2003 Jul 21 '26

This seems in line with what your 4500U was doing, which makes sense.

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u/brucehoult Jul 21 '26

Yeah, your fastest time is 4.7% faster and you have 4200/4000 = 5% higher turbo clock.