gnu as is really a family of assemblers. If you use (or have used) the gnu assembler on one architecture, you should find a fairly similar environment when you use it on another architecture. Each version has much in common with the others, including object file formats, most assembler directives (often called pseudo-ops) and assembler syntax.
as is primarily intended to assemble the output of the
gnu C compiler gcc for use by the linker
ld. Nevertheless, we've tried to make as
assemble correctly everything that other assemblers for the same
machine would assemble.
Any exceptions are documented explicitly (see Machine Dependencies).
This doesn't mean as always uses the same syntax as another
assembler for the same architecture; for example, we know of several
incompatible versions of 680x0 assembly language syntax.
Unlike older assemblers, as is designed to assemble a source
program in one pass of the source file. This has a subtle impact on the
.org directive (see .org).