OK, I started reading the intel docs to find out about the hardware interupts available... but now I have started reading them all!! its quite good info, but the thing is I am now only up to volume 1: start of chapter 4, and it has been at the very least ~100-200 pages, its just way to much to read, so what parts are good and what should I skip?
Also, reading about this and some of the extra instruction sets (MMX, XMM, SSE, SSE2, etc) are these portiable? eg should I bother learning them and using them? or will it just make is so my program can only run on the chip I use the specfic instruction sets for... also, do AMD and Intel use the same registers and instuction sets? like am I safe programming for one for it to work on the other? (asm, not C)