[1] - Computer Architecture

1940-1950

Electronic computers as we know them today began in around

Specific purposes such as:

• Decrypting / Encrypting messages

• Numeric computing

• Business computation

Computer were created for______ contrary to a general purpose computer we understand today

Vacuum tube

• Dioeds, triodes, etc.

• They were

  • unreliable

  • has high electric consumption

  • gives off too much heat

transistor

Compared to vacuum tubes, these:

• had less power consumption

• were smaller

• had greater reliability

integrated circuit

Compared to transistors, these were

• smaller and lighter

• more reliable

1960s

According to literature, mainframes were introduced in the ?

1970s

According to literature, minicomputers were introduced in the ?

1980s

According to literature, desktop computers were introduced in the ?

1990s

According to literature, this was when the Internet and WWW emerged

IBM in 1964 for the use with the IBM 360

The term computer architecture was coined by what company and for what?

programmer-visible portion of the instruction set

According to Amdahl, Blaauw and Brooks, computer architecture is the

architecture

the structure of a computer that a machine language programmer must understand to write a correct program for that machine

They must be proficient in computer architecture. They also

1. determine what attributes of a new computer are important;

2. design the computer to maximize efficiency and performance considering power, availability, and cost; and

3. define what instructions are supported, how much memory is used, etc.

What is expected of those who design computers?

• The actual programmer-visible instruction set

• Boundary between the hardware and the software

• Defines what instructions can be understood by the processor

What are the different definitions of Instruction Set Architecture

• Lasts through many generations (portability)

• Used in many different ways (generality)

• Provides convenient functionality to higher levels

• Permits an efficient implementation at lower levels

Properties of a good abstraction

• Class of ISA

• Memory addressing

• Addressing modes

• Types and sizes of operands

• Operations

• Control flow instruction

• Encoding an ISA

What are the seven dimensions of ISA?

Class of ISA

General-purpose vs special-purpose register architectures

• Mostly general-purpose
  Example: 80x86 has 16 general-purpose registers and 16 that can hold floating point data

Memory Addressing

Virtually all desktop and server computers, including the 80x86 and MIPS, use byte addressing to access memory operands.

faster

Aligned operators are generally?

Addressing Modes

Specifies the address of a memory object, registers and constant operands

• Immediate

• Register

• Displacement

• 8-bit (ASCII character),

• 16-bit (Unicode character or half word),

• 32-bit (integer or word),

• 64-bit (double word or long integer), and

• IEEE 754 floating point in 32-bit (single precision) and 64-bit (double precision).

What are the types and sizes of operands?

• data transfer

• arithmetic

• logical

• control

• floating point

What are the general categories of operations?

Control flow instructions

support for conditional branches, unconditional jumps, procedure calls, and returns.

fixed and variable length

What are the two basic choices on encoding?

Variable length

This type of length instruction takes up less space

• CPU

• Memory Unit

• Storage

• I/O

What does the Von Neumann architecture consist of?