Well I agree that the ARM instruction set is more elegant, but I don't see it as a big enough improvement to warrant the extra hassle of getting set up. It's to

Well I agree that the ARM instruction set is more elegant, but I don't see it as a big enough improvement to warrant the extra hassle of getting set up. It's too easy for the student to get confused with all the tools and spend less time on the actual matter at hand. When learning assembly, what matters is getting used to instructions, registers, control flow and explicit memory accesses rather than statements, expressions, functions and variables. It really doesn't matter which ISA you're learning, the actual skill you learn is how to read the documentation of a CPU architecture and tools to write and debug assembly code. > It also suffers from nonstandardisation of the vector instructions like ARM does, although you can reasonably assume FPU and MMX these days. This is not correct. ARM has at least 7 different FPU ISAs: 5 versions of VFP and 2 versions of NEON. I have devices at hand with three different float units (all consumer devices). In x86 world you can rely on SSE2 safely, it's been around since Pentium 4 (1999) and is required on all 64 bit architectures (by contrast, NEON is rather new). But this is kind of a moot point since introductory assembly courses don't go too deep on floating point units anyway. Additionally, in the ARM world, there's several revisions of the ISA/architecture being used, ARMv7 (32bit) and ARMv8 (64bit) and a dozen different variants for embedded products. And two different instruction encodings (thumb). It's not at all less confusing. > AMD64 might be an interesting choice to start with these days. For basic user space programming it probably doesn't make a difference but for bare metal/kernel programming, the AMD64 architecture is more, not less, confusing than the x86_32. But in my opinion, it really doesn't matter what you learn first. The details of the ISA itself is of secondary importance, understanding how to read the documentation of the architecture and getting some hands on experience is way more important.