CS 154 Midterm Review
Prof. Fred Chong
Department of Computer Science
University of California at Santa Barbara
DISCLAIMER: This review sheet is not guaranteed to be
all-inclusive, but I will attempt to cover the majority of important
topics in this list.
You will need your Matloff handout .
The exam is open book and open notes. A calculator may be helpful
to you and you may bring one.
Old exams from previous classes and other
faculty are available, but are not necessarily representative of the exam.
NOTE: The old exam solutions occasionally contain errors. It is your
responsibility to understand and verify the solutions. Applying an error
from an old exam to your exam will not get you credit.
In general, you should be prepared to understand a new machine
similar to the MIC-1 and answer questions relating to the following
topics as they pertain to the new machine. Understanding labs 1-2 is
the best preparation.
MIC-1 Microprogramming
Make sure you understand the dispatch code. Why
"tir:=lshift(ir+ir)" on line 3 of the MIC-1 implementation of the
MAC-1?
Make sure you understand what happens in each of the four
subcycles.
Understand why certain operations can not be done in the same
instruction (cycle). Why can't we do "a:=b; c:=d;" in one cycle? Why
can't we do "mar:=d; a:=b+c;" in one cycle?
Pipelining
Understand how pipelining is applied to an architecture. What
determines clock cycle? Why not use an arbitrarily large number of
stages? Know how to calculate throughput and latency for a pipeline.
How does latch overhead (pipeline registers) affect these
calculations?
Understand what state is persistent in a processor and what makes
a nop.
Last updated May 2009
chong@cs.ucsb.edu