Itanium® Architecture for Programmers: Understanding 64-Bit Processors and EPIC Principles

Exercises

1:	Compare and critique the hardware support for control of flow through software routines that is provided in various ways by computer architectures. What is special about the approach taken for Itanium architecture?
2:	Defend or refute the proposition that predicate register bits in Itanium architecture are no better than condition code bits in traditional architectures (e.g., VAX).
3:	In Alpha architecture, the various sorts of relational test (equality and signed or unsigned inequality) are built into the opcodes of conditional branch instructions, and there are separate forms of branch instructions for integer and floating-point data. In Itanium architecture, the relational tests are built into the opcodes of compare instructions, and ...