Download Exam Study Guideline - Computer Architecture | CS 271 and more Study notes Computer Architecture and Organization in PDF only on Docsity! CS 271 1 Exam Study Guideline In general, you need to study the material in the lecture slides and textbook. This exam cover Chapter1, Appendix 1, and Chapter 2:1-9 The exam usually includes True/Fall questions, short answers to concepts and small problem, and word problems as in the homework assignment. The following concepts and theory should be focused: 1. Understand each assigned homework and be able to finish each quickly 2. Review the “Check Yourself” sections and compare your answers with the answers in the book 3. Review Fallacies and Pitfalls of each chapter 4. Five components of a computer 5. datapath and control (page 20) 6. Processor chip (Figure 1.9) 7. instruction set architecture (page 22) 8. VLSI (page 28) 9. instruction set (Section 2.1) 10. registers, word, 11. memory addresses, how to address a byte and how to address a word (4-bytes), alignment restriction (Section 2.3) 12. Compiling using registers, operand in memory, load, and store (Section 2.3) 13. spilling registers (Section 2.3) 14. instructions add, sub, addi, lw, sw, refer to Figure 2.4 15. Translating a MIPS instruction into a machine instruction (See examples in pages 61, 65, we have done these many times in class using the Green Paper) 16. conversion between binary, hexadecimal, and decimal 17. access array elements in memory assume each element is a word 18. logical operations: add, addi, or, ori, nor, sll, and srl 19. instructions for making decision: beq, bne, slt, slti 20. compile if, if-then-else, while loop, for loop 21. MIPS machine language example (Figure 2.13) 22. procedure calling convention (page 79) , jal and jr instructions 23. Program counter (PC), return address ($ra), the relationship between PC and $ra 24. stack, stack pointer (page 80), and procedure frame and frame pointer (page 86) 25. Study carefully Section 2.7, especially examples 26. compile a procedure that doesn’t call another procedure 27. argument passing, return value, store (preserve) old register values in stack in case the procedure modifies them, restore the old register values 28. Support nested procedure, $ra, argument registers, etc. 29. Figure 2.15 shows the convention for preserving the register in stack 30. Allocate space for new data on the stack, allocate space for new data on the heap. Run fact.s (available in website http://users.ipfw.edu/liud/class/cs271f08/Lecture/CS271_lecture_reading.html Lecture and Reading ) in the SPIM (how the PC starts from 0040 0000hex and refer to Figure 2.17 here)
