CSCI 2321 (Principles of Computer Design), Spring 2004:
Review for Midterm
The exam will be in class March 10. You will have 50 minutes.
You may use your textbook and any notes or papers you care to bring,
but you may not use other books,
a calculator or computer, or (of course) each other's papers.
Most questions will be similar in form to those in the homework
assignments and quizzes.
You are responsible for all material covered in class,
but the following is a summary of topics I think are most important.
- Terminology from chapter 1;
the five classic components of a computer.
- Defining and measuring performance;
relationship among execution time,
clock rate, cycle time, and cycles per instruction.
- Idea of ``instruction set architecture'' (as the interface
between hardware and software).
- MIPS instructions described in chapter 3 -- usage and
binary (machine-language) representation.
- Compilers, assemblers, linkers, and loaders.
- MIPS conventions for procedure calls.
- Binary, decimal, and hexadecimal number systems;
two's complement notation.
- Computer arithmetic (on integers):
addition, subtraction, multiplication and division
(basic ideas only, not details of algorithms), overflow.
- MIPS instructions for manipulating bits (sll, srl,
and, or, etc.).
- AND and OR gates and inverters, and how to use them to implement
Boolean functions.
- Design of an ALU.
- Floating-point representation and arithmetic (basic ideas
only, not details).
You should have read (or at least skimmed) all of chapters 1, 2,
3, and 4.
The following is a list
of sections to read more carefully and/or review.
- In chapter 1: 1.1, 1.2, and 1.7.
- In chapter 2: 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3.
- In chapter 3: 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.8, 3.9, 3.11,
and 3.14.
- In chapter 4: 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.10 (first two pages),
4.11.
(For the multiplication and division algorithms,
you don't need to memorize details, just see
in general how the sketched hardware design relates
to the algorithm.)
Berna Massingill
2004-04-28