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cmpxchg486

Compare and exchange, 486 opcode Undocumented

Performs the cmpxchg compare-and-exchange under a non-standard opcode that some 486 processors accepted.

486 and latertakes lockremoved from the architectureNot available in 64-bit mode

Intel's reference: CMPXCHG

CFPFAFZFSFDFOF ●●●●●–●
  • ● set from the result
  • – not changed

Forms

Operands

r/m
A general-purpose register or memory location matching the operation’s size, for example rax or qword [rbp-8]. The byte registers ah, bh, ch and dh cannot be used with a REX prefix, including when the memory address uses r8–r15.
reg
A general-purpose register matching the operation’s size, for example al, ax, eax or rax. The byte registers ah, bh, ch and dh cannot be used with a REX prefix, which is required by spl, bpl, sil, dil and r8–r15.

CMPXCHG compares its destination (first) operand to the value in AL, AX or EAX (depending on the operand size of the instruction). If they are equal, it copies its source (second) operand into the destination and sets the zero flag. Otherwise, it clears the zero flag and copies the destination register to AL, AX or EAX.

The destination can be either a register or a memory location. The source is a register.

CMPXCHG is intended to be used for atomic operations in multitasking or multiprocessor environments. To safely update a value in shared memory, for example, you might load the value into EAX, load the updated value into EBX, and then execute the instruction LOCK CMPXCHG [value],EBX. If value has not changed since being loaded, it is updated with your desired new value, and the zero flag is set to let you know it has worked. (The LOCK prefix prevents another processor doing anything in the middle of this operation: it guarantees atomicity.) However, if another processor has modified the value in between your load and your attempted store, the store does not happen, and you are notified of the failure by a cleared zero flag, so you can go round and try again.