Intel x86 Assembly Language & Microarchitecture Register Fundamentals Segment Registers

Example

Segmentation

When Intel was designing the original 8086, there were already a number of 8-bit processors that had 16-bit capabilities - but they wanted to produce a true 16-bit processor. They also wanted to produce something better and more capable than what was already out there, so they wanted to be able to access more than the maximum of 65,536 bytes of memory implied by 16-bit addressing registers.

Original Segment Registers

So they implemented the idea of "Segments" - a 64 kilobyte block of memory indexed by the 16-bit address registers - that could be re-based to address different areas of the total memory. To hold these segment bases, they included Segment Registers:

• CS The Code Segment register.
  This holds the segment of the code that is currently being executed, indexed by the implicit IP (Instruction Pointer) register.
• DS The Data Segment register.
  This holds the default segment for data being manipulated by the program.
• ES The Extra Segment register.
  This holds a second data segment, for simultaneous data operations across the total memory.
• SS The Stack Segment register.
  This holds the segment of memory that holds the current stack.

Segment Size?

The segment registers could be any size, but making them 16 bits wide made it easy to interoperate with the other registers. The next question was: should the segments overlap, and if so, how much? The answer to that question would dictate the total memory size that could be accessed.

If there was no overlap at all, then the address space would be 32 bits - 4 gigabytes - a totally unheard-of size at the time! A more "natural" overlap of 8 bits would produce a 24-bit address space, or 16 megabytes. In the end Intel decided to save four more address pins on the processor by making the address space 1 megabyte with a 12-bit overlap - they considered this sufficiently large for the time!

More Segment Registers!

When Intel was designing the 80386, they recognised that the existing suite of 4 Segment Registers wasn't enough for the complexity of programs that they wanted it to be able to support. So they added two more:

• FS The Far Segment register
• GS The Global Segment register

These new Segment registers didn't have any processor-enforced uses: they were merely available for whatever the programmer wanted.

Some say that the names were chosen to simply continue the C, D, E theme of the existing set...