Does LEA perform signed or unsigned arithmetic?

Question

I'm trying to understand how this line works:

lea (%eax, %eax, 4), %eax

So it looks like this essentially says:

%eax = 5* %eax

But does LEA treat as signed or unsigned?

Answer 1

1. LEA is not really intended to do arithmetic operations but to calculate the absolute address of a memory operation.

2. There would be no difference between a signed and an unsigned operation; the result for a signed operation and an unsigned operation is the same in this case.

3. As far as I know there is no possibility to multiply a register with a negative constant using the LEA instruction