Review


Know the Concepts

  • 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?

Use the Concepts

  • 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?

Going Further

  • 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.




Programming from the Ground Up
Programming from the Ground Up
ISBN: 0975283847
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 137

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