CS 654 Reading Guide, Chapter 2
Hennessy & Patterson, 3rd ed.
These are topics I expect you to understand even if I do not cover
them in class. Of course, I encourage you to read the rest of the
chapter for your own enlightenment.
Understand how to write a short program using stack, accumulator, and general-purpose-register
machines. Understand what a load-store architecture is. Understand
the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches.
Understand the instruction types, memory-addressing modes, control-flow
instruction types, and operand sizes and types.
Understand what issues drive the choice of offset and immediate sizes in
an instruction encoding.
Understand what an architecture should provide to help the compiler writer
(regularity, etc.).
Understand what the different major memory segments are (stack, global-data,
heap, and text).
Be able to discuss the merits of an ISA based on these principles (like
the chapter evaluates MIPS).
Understand the pitfalls described in the chapter.
Last updated Oct. 2, 2001
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