Common Assembly Instructions

Jim Keller has remarked that there are about 25 instructions in common use that all instruction sets need. Let’s talk about them.

x86

• mov was about 40%
• push was about 10%
• pop was about 4%
• call was about 7%
• ret was about 7%
• je/jne was about 3%
• jmp was also 3%
• cmp was 5%
• add/sub was 10%
• and/or/xor was 5%
• lea was 3%
• nop was about 3%

This is about the same for ARM and RISC-V, where moving instructions were most dominant.