Get the upper half of the EAX register

Question

In x86 assembly language, is there any way to obtain the upper half of the EAX register? I know that the AX register already contains the lower hal

Answer 1

If you want to preserve EAX and the upper half of EBX:

rol eax, 16
mov bx, ax
rol eax, 16

If have a scratch register available, this is more efficient (and doesn't introduce extra latency for later instructions that read EAX):

mov ecx, eax
shr ecx, 16
mov  bx, cx

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If you don't need either of those, mov ebx, eax / shr ebx, 16 is the obvious way and avoids any partial-register stalls or false dependencies.