Lecture 8 Flashcards
What is hardware abstraction?
The hardware level, the only physical level, consists of electrical circuits that implement complex combinations of logical operations such as XOR, AND, OR and NOT gates, known as digital logic.
What is microcode abstraction?
The microcode level is also known as firmware. Microcode operates only on the exact circuitry for which it was designed. It contains micro instructions that translate from the higher machine-code level to provide a way to interface with the hardware.
What is machine code abstraction?
The machine code level consists of opcodes, hexadecimal digits that tell the processor what you want it to do.
What is Low-level languages abstraction?
A low-level language is a human-readable version of a computer architecture’s instruction set. The most common low-level language is assembly language.
What is High-level languages abstraction?
Most computer programmers operate at the level of high-level languages. High-level languages provide strong abstraction from the machine level and make it easy to use programming login and flow-control mechanisms.
What is interpreted languages abstraction?
Interpreted languages are at the top level.
What are registers?
Small amount of data storage available to the CPU, whose contents can be accessed more quickly than storage available elsewhere.
What are General-purpose registers?
Used by the CPU during execution.
What are segment registers?
Used to track sections of memory.
What are status flags?
Used to make decisions ZF, CF, SF, TF etc.
What is the instruction pointer?
Used to keep track of the next instruction to execute.
