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Study Guide I

  CSc 314 Study Material

Study Guide II>>
Study guide for Exam I.
  1. Understand the terms related to performance: Execution time, instruction Count, CPI, clock cycle time (period), and clock rate (cycles per second), and MIPS.

  2. Be able to solve problems like the examples in the text.
    1. Convert between clock cycle time and clock rate.

    2. Be able to compute the number of cycles required to run a program given the CPI and number of instructions.

    3. Be able to compute execution time of a program given the number of cycles and clock period.

    4. Understand MIPS, and be able to compute the MIPS value of a program.

  3. Understand the advantages of benchmarks over single-number performance figures.

  4. Understand what makes a good benchmark.

  5. Be able to translate assembler instructions into binary.
    1. Understand each format.

    2. Be able to get the register numbers in the right places.

    3. Understand the peculiarities of branch and jump targets.

  6. Be able to translate assembler pseudo-instructions into hardware-supported instructions. This includes support for pseudo-addressing modes, like ld $s1, boris.

  7. Understand the assembler register use conventions, and be able to create and call an assembler function.

  8. Understand how conditional execution and looping are accomplished in assembler code.
Study Guide II>>