Review of Essential Terms and Concepts

1. Explain the difference between register-to-register, register-to-memory, and memory-to-memory instructions.

2. Several design decisions exist with regard to instruction sets. Name four and explain.

3. What is an expanding opcode?

4. If a byte-addressable machine with 32-bit words stores the hex value 98765432, indicate how this value would be stored on a little endian machine and on a big endian machine. Why does "endian-ness" matter?

5. We can design stack architectures, accumulator architectures, or general-purpose register architectures. Explain the differences between these choices and give some situations where one might be better than another.

6. How do memory-memory, register-memory, and load-store architectures differ? How are they the same?

7. What are the pros and cons of fixed-length and variable-length instructions? Which is currently more popular?

8. How does an architecture based on zero operands ever get any data values from memory?

9. Which is likely to be longer (have more instructions): a program written for a zero-address architecture, a program written for a one-address architecture, or a program written for a two-address architecture? Why?

10. Why might stack architectures represent arithmetic expressions in reverse Polish notation?

11. Name the seven types of data instructions and explain each.

12. What is an address mode?

13. Give examples of immediate, direct, register, indirect, register indirect, and indexed addressing.

14. How does indexed addressing differ from based addressing?

15. Why do we need so many different addressing modes?

16. Explain the concept behind pipelining.

17. What is the theoretical speedup for a 4-stage pipeline with a 20ns clock cycle if it is processing 100 tasks?

18. What are the pipeline conflicts that can cause a slowdown in the pipeline?

19. What are the two types of ILP and how do they differ?

20. Explain superscalar, superpipelining, and VLIW architectures.

21. List several ways in which the Intel and MIPS ISAs differ. Name several ways in which they are the same.

22. Explain Java bytecodes.

23. Give an example of a current stack-based architecture and a current GPR-based architecture. How do they differ?