Exchanges the contents of the destination (first) and source (second) operands. The operands can be two general-purpose registers or a register and a memory location.
If a memory operand is referenced, the processor’s locking protocol is automatically implemented for the duration of the exchange operation, regardless of the presence or absence of the LOCK prefix or of the value of the IOPL. (See the LOCK prefix description in this chapter for more information on the locking protocol.)
This instruction is useful for implementing semaphores or similar data structures for process synchronization. (See “Bus Locking” in Chapter 8 of the Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer’s Manual, Volume 3A, for more information on bus locking.)
This instruction can be used with a LOCK prefix to allow the instruction to be executed atomically. To simplify the interface to the processor’s bus, the destination operand receives a write cycle without regard to the result of the comparison. The destination operand is written back if the comparison fails; otherwise, the source operand is written into the destination. (The processor never produces a locked read without also producing a locked write.)