Assembly Programng Can the upper 16 bits of the four 32 bit general registers in the x86 architecture be addressed directly? (Yes or No and why) Solution Yes the upper 16 bits of the four 32 bit general registers in the x86 architecture be addressed directly. The main registers (except instruction pointer) are \"general-purpose\" in the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the instruction set and can be used for anything, They can be used for : AL/AH (Accumulators), Base index (used for arrays), CL/CH (counters), DL/DH (used for precision of Accumulators) etc..