Describe the fetch-execute cycle.
What is a register? How would computation be more difficult without registers?
How do you represent numbers larger than 255?
How big are the registers on the machines we will be using?
How does a computer know how to interpret a given byte or set of bytes of memory?
What are the addressing modes and what are they used for?
What does the instruction pointer do?
What data would you use in an employee record? How would you lay it out in memory?
If I had the pointer to the beginning of the employee record above, and wanted to access a particular piece of data inside of it, what addressing mode would I use?
In base pointer addressing mode, if you have a register holding the value 3122, and an offset of 20, what address would you be trying to access?
In indexed addressing mode, if the base address is 6512, the index register has a 5, and the multiplier is 4, what address would you be trying to access?
In indexed addressing mode, if the base address is 123472, the index register has a 0, and the multiplier is 4, what address would you be trying to access?
In indexed addressing mode, if the base address is 9123478, the index register has a 20, and the multiplier is 1, what address would you be trying to access?
What are the minimum number of addressing modes needed for computation?
Why include addressing modes that aren't strictly needed?
Research and then describe how pipelining (or one of the other complicating factors) affects the fetch-execute cycle.
Research and then describe the tradeoffs between fixed-length instructions and variable-length instructions.