INFO 1505 Tutorial 2

Topic: the rudiments of data storage within digital computers.

introduces the basics of digital circuitry
o AND, OR,NOT, XOR, NOR, NAND gates
o Simple circuit diagrams, truth table
o how a simple flip-flop can be used to store a single bit.
discuss how information are encoded as bit patterns
o Character representation ASCII, Unicode
o Integer representation sign & magnitude, ones complement, twos complement
o Floating point representation, IEEE 754 standard for single precision floating pt
o the problems of overflow errors, truncation errors,
Sample Questions refer to Tutorial 1 and Assignment 1
Topic: Data Manipulation
Introduces:
the role of a computer's CPU
registers- PC, MAR, MBR, IR fetching data/instructions from memory, writing data to
memory
an understanding of the instruction cycle,
the various operations (or, and, exclusive or, add, shift, etc.) performed by a typical
arithmetic/logic unit
optimizations to processor throughput - cache and instruction pipelining
a simple appreciation of machine language programming machine languages
introduces some alternatives to the von Neumann architecture such as multiprocessor
machines SIMD, MIMD
1. State the purpose of each of the following registers: PC, MAR, MBR, IR, AC.
2. List the steps performed by the control unit during a fetch instruction.
3. List the steps performed by the control unit during a write operation to memory.
4. What is meant by the term instruction cycle?
5. State four different types of operations supported by a machine instruction set.
6. What is the typical format of a machine instruction?
7. What is meant by instruction pipelining?
8. Suppose that an instruction pipeline contains 3 stages: fetch instruction (FI), decode
instruction and fetch operands (FO), execute instruction (EI). Each stage takes t time units.
a. What is the time taken to execute 6 instructions in a non-pipelined processor?
b. What is the time taken to execute the same 6 instructions on the pipelined processor?
c. What is the speed up of the pipelined processor over the non-pipelined processor?
9. What is the role of cache memory?
10.

Write the result of the following operations: 00010101 XOR 11110011 followed by a
3-bit right circular shift on the result.

11.

Identify both the mask and the logical operation needed to accomplish each of the
following on an 8-bit register:

(i) Put 0s in the middle four bits without disturbing the rest of the other bits.
(ii)

Put a 1 in the most significant bit of the register without disturbing the other bits.

(iii) Complement the most significant bit without changing the other bits.
12.

Identify 4 main I/O operations.

13.

What is the role of an I/O module?

14.

Differentiate between programmed I/O, Interrupt driven I/O and direct memory access.