Digital Design and Computer Architecture

Chapter 6 Architecture

6.1 Introduction

6.2 Assembly Language

6.3 Machine Language

6.4 Programming

6.5 Addressing Modes

6.6 Lights, Camera, Action: Compiling, Assembling, and Loading

6.7 Odds and Ends^*

6.8 Real World Perspective: IA-32 Architecture^*

6.9 Summary

Exercises

Interview Questions

6.1 INTRODUCTION

The previous chapters introduced digital design principles and building blocks. In this chapter, we jump up a few levels of abstraction to define the architecture of a computer (see Figure 1.1). The architecture is the programmer’s view of a computer. It is defined by the instruction set (language), and operand locations (registers and memory). Many different architectures exist, such as IA-32, MIPS, SPARC, and PowerPC.

The first step in ...