An Introduction to This Course

This course gives a study of computer architecture consisting of two themes: Computer architecture is not about using computers to design buildings. Computer architecture is defined as
Computer architecture is the science and art of selecting and interconnecting hardware components, which include CPUs, memory, storage, and I/O, to create computers that meet functional, performance, and cost goals.
On the other hand, assembly language is defined as
Assembly language is a symbolic representation of the machine language, which consists entirely of numbers, of a specific processor.
A processor only understands machine code. An assembly language program has to be converted to machine code by an assembler before a processor executes it. An example of an assembly language program and its corresponding machine code is given below:


Address
Label
Instruction (AT&T Syntax)
Object Code
   
  .begin		  
      .org 2048  
    a_start   .equ 3000  
  2048     ld length,%  
  2064     be done   00000010 10000000 00000000 00000110
  2068     addcc %r1,-4,%r1   10000010 10000000 01111111 11111100
  2072     addcc %r1,%r2,%r4   10001000 10000000 01000000 00000010
  2076     ld %r4,%r5   11001010 00000001 00000000 00000000
  2080     ba loop   00010000 10111111 11111111 11111011
  2084     addcc %r3,%r5,%r3   10000110 10000000 11000000 00000101
  2088   done:   jmpl %r15+4,%r0   10000001 11000011 11100000 00000100
  2092   length:   20   00000000 00000000 00000000 00010100
  2096   address:   a_start   00000000 00000000 00001011 10111000
      .org a_start  
  3000

   a:

    




      Sad after the funeral of a friend,    
      my wife and I ducked into a Chinese restaurant for a pick-me-up.    
      The feel-good session ended when I read the fortune cookie:    
      “You will soon be reunited with a good friend.”