Assembly Language

Question 1

What is the Von Neumann Architecture?

Question 2

What does CPU consists of?

Answer 2

Control unit, arithmetic and Logical Unit (ALU) and registers

Question 3

What kind of register are there in the CPU? Explain the roles.

Answer 3

Program counter - Address of the NEXT Instruction

Instruction register - Instruction CURRENTLY being executed or decoded

Address register - either stores the memory address from which data will be fetched, or the address to which data will sent and stored

Accumulator - SHORT - term, intermediate storage of arithmetic and logic data computations

Question 4

What is a system bus?

Question 5

What is the 3 system bus and its purpose?

Answer 5

1. Control Bus - Carries commands from the CPU and returns status signals from the devices
2. Data Bus - carries the actual data
3. Address bus - carries memory addresses from the processor to other components

Answer 6

Memory (RAM)
Input/output units

Question 7

What does the clock cycle do in the Von Neumann Architecture?

Question 8

What are the structures in the Harvard Architecture?

Answer 8

1. Separate memory for instructions and Data
2. Parallelism

Question 9

What are the purposes of the two structures in the Harvard Architecture?

Answer 9

1. There are two memory spaces inline VNA, where one is for instructions and the other one for data
2. Instructions and data can be fetched at the same time, leading to faster execution.

Question 10

What does the case study - MIPS R4000 tells us?

Answer 10

MIPS stands for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages.

Question 11

What does the MIPS R4000 case study tells us?

Question 12

What are the 8 stages pipeline (super-piped)?

Answer 12

1. IF
   2.IS
   3.RF
   4.EX
   5.DF
   6.DS
   7.TC
   8.WB

Question 13

What is the function of each pipeline stages?