LEA operation

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http://www.arl.wustl.edu/~lockwood/class/cs306/books/artofasm/Chapter_6/CH06-1.html#HEADING1-136

The lea (Load Effective Address) instruction is another instruction used to prepare pointer values. The lea instruction takes the form:

                lea     dest, source

The specific forms on the 80x86 are

                lea     reg16, mem

                lea     reg32, mem      (3)



(3) Available only on 80386 and later processors.

It loads the specified 16 or 32 bit general purpose register with the effective address of the specified memory location. The effective address is the final memory address obtained after all addressing mode computations. For example, lea ax, ds:[1234h] loads the ax register with the address of memory location 1234h; here it just loads the ax register with the value 1234h. If you think about it for a moment, this isn't a very exciting operation. After all, the mov ax, immediate_data instruction can do this. So why bother with the lea instruction at all? Well, there are many other forms of a memory operand besides displacement-only operands. Consider the following lea instructions:

It loads the specified 16 or 32 bit general purpose register with the effective address of the specified memory location. The effective address is the final memory address obtained after all addressing mode computations. For example, lea ax, ds:[1234h] loads the ax register with the address of memory location 1234h; here it just loads the ax register with the value 1234h. If you think about it for a moment, this isn't a very exciting operation. After all, the mov ax, immediate_data instruction can do this. So why bother with the lea instruction at all? Well, there are many other forms of a memory operand besides displacement-only operands. Consider the following lea instructions:

                lea     ax, [bx]
                lea     bx, 3[bx]
                lea     ax, 3[bx]
                lea     bx, 4[bp+si]
                lea     ax, -123[di]

The lea ax, [bx] instruction copies the address of the expression [bx] into the ax register. Since the effective address is the value in the bx register, this instruction copies bx's value into the ax register. Again, this instruction isn't very interesting because mov can do the same thing, even faster.

The lea bx,3[bx] instruction copies the effective address of 3[bx] into the bx register. Since this effective address is equal to the current value of bx plus three, this lea instruction effectively adds three to the bx register. There is an add instruction that will let you add three to the bx register, so again, the lea instruction is superfluous for this purpose.

The third lea instruction above shows where lea really begins to shine. lea ax, 3[bx] copies the address of the memory location 3[bx] into the ax register; i.e., it adds three with the value in the bx register and moves the sum into ax. This is an excellent example of how you can use the lea instruction to do a mov operation and an addition with a single instruction.

The final two instructions above, lea bx,4[bp+si] and lea ax,-123[di] provide additional examples of lea instructions that are more efficient than their mov/add counterparts.