Exam 1 Review

• Comer Ch. 2: Gates and Circuits
  • and, or, not, nand, nor, and xor gates. Gate symbols, functions, truth tables.
  • equivalence of gate circuits, truth tables, and boolean formulas
  • difference between combinatorial and sequential logic
  • function of demultiplexor and counter
• Comer Ch. 3 and Britton Ch. 3: Numbers
  • Binary, hex, and octal representations
  • 2's complement representation; 10's complement representation; conversion from decimal to 2's complement representation
  • Operations on 2's and 10's complement numbers (I won't ask you to multiply or divide in base 8 or base 16 but you should know what issues arise w.r.t. word size for these operations; multiplication in base 2 is fair game)
  • Floating point representation
• Comer Ch. 4-6 and Britton Ch. 1: Processor components
  • General and special purpose registers
  • Program counter/instruction pointer
  • ALU and control logic
  • Properties distinguishing RISC and CISC processors
  • Instruction formats (general from Comer, MIPS specific from Britton)
  • Pipelines along with issues such as stalls
  • Fetch-execute cycle
  • Addressing modes: register, register indirect, memory indirect
  • Difference between lw, la, li instructions
• Comer Ch 7
  • Processor modes
  • Microcode - horizontal and vertical; advantages and disadvantages of microcoded processors
• Britton Ch. 2
  • Register usage conventions; caller save; callee save
  • Transalation of if-then-else, while and other loops, switch
  • Assemble directives: text and data segments, initialized data, symbolic addresses
  • Advantages and disadvantages of assembler programming