THE FIRST MIDTERM

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THE FIRST MIDTERM

• Jehan-François Pâris
• jfparis_at_sbcglobal.net

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MATERIALS

• Chapter I Introduction
• Chapter II Principles of Digital Circuits
• Combinatorial Circuits, Latches and Flipflops,
  Sequential Circuits
• Chapter III Instruction Set Design
• Generalities, Examples (IBM, MIPS, ARM, x86),
  Conclusions
• Chapter IV Computer Arithmetic
• Integer addition, subtraction, multiplication and
  division

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Important

• Floating-point arithmetic will not be on the test.

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Chapter I

• Very little to study
• Understand how SPEC benchmarks are computed,
  including the use of the geometric means
• Expect at least one problem on Amdahls Law

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Amdahls Law (III)

• The total speedup for the whole system will be
• The maximum possible speedup when Ti ? 0

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Chapter II

• Expect problems similar to those in the first
  problem set but shorter
• You should also be able to read and understand
  complex combinatorial circuits and simple
  sequential circuits

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Chapter III

• Focus on generalities and conclusions
• You do not need to memorize the MIPS instruction
  set but need to know
• The three MIPS instruction formats and their
  addressing modes
• How some specific MIPS instructions work
• The role of the zero register

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Example

• Given the instruction
• ADDI r1, r2, m
• explain how you can increment by four the
  contents of register s4
• ADDI s4, s4, 4

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Chapter IV

• Understand signed and unsigned binary numbers and
  how to change the sign of a number
• Expect one or two problems
• Understand the various designs for adders,
  subtraction engines, multipliers and dividers