Materials
Resources
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Buzzwords are terms that are mentioned during lecture which are particularly important to understand thoroughly. This page tracks the buzzwords for each of the lectures and can be used as a reference for finding gaps in your understanding of course material.
* Microarchitecture
* Three major tradeoffs of computer architecture
* Macro-architecture
* LC-3b ISA
* Unused instructions
* Bit steering
* Instruction processing style
* 0,1,2,3 address machines
* Stack machine
* Accumulator machine
* 2-operand machine
* 3-operand machine
* Tradeoffs between 0,1,2,3 address machines
* Postfix notation
* Instructions/Opcode/Operade specifiers (i.e. addressing modes)
* Simply vs. complex data type (and their tradeoffs)
* Semantic gap and level
* Translation layer
* Addressability
* Byte/bit addressable machines
* Virtual memory
* Big/little endian
* Benefits of having registers (data locality)
* Programmer visible (Architectural) state
* Programmers can access this directly
* What are the benefits?
* Microarchitectural state
* Programmers cannot access this directly
* Evolution of registers (from accumulators to registers)
* Different types of instructions
* Control instructions
* Data instructions
* Operation instructions
* Addressing modes
* Tradeoffs (complexity, flexibility, etc.)
* Orthogonal ISA
* Addressing modes that are orthogonal to instruction types
* I/O devices
* Vectored vs. non-vectored interrupts
* Complex vs. simple instructions
* Tradeoffs
* RISC vs. CISC
* Tradeoff
* Backward compatibility
* Performance
* Optimization opportunity
* Translation