CSE 30 -- Lecture 1 -- Sep 30

Topics covered in class

Basic abstract hardware black boxes: CPU, memory, I/O devices, all communicating via a system bus
Instruction Set Architecture versus Micro-Architecture: ISA is the machine language, which is the interface to the machine or assembly language programmer (or compiled programs); micro-architecture is the design of the machine (functional units, data paths, etc) to implement that ISA
CISC vs RISC:
- examples: x86, 68000, vax are CISC architectures; MIPS, Alpha, Sparc, PowerPC are RISC architectures
- characteristics where they differ: general vs instruction specific registers, instruction density, bandwidth, complex versus simple instructions -- simpler instructions are easier to decode, leading to shorter cycle times (time for a single instruction to execute)
- CISCs were designed when memory was expensive, thus optimized for "higher level" instructions that does more; RISCs were designed when memory got cheaper, thus traded off less dense instructions to optimize for shorter cycle times and getter overall performance.
- RISC is also a more quantified engineered approach: instructions are added / dropped from an instruction set depending on whether compilers can use them (and how often), as traded off against the cost in overall cycle time. CISC instruction sets were designed for human programmers to use directly in hand-written assembly language programs.
Instruction set format: op code, operands, addressing modes
MIPS: there are 32 general purpose registers, 32-bit instruction format.

Handouts: class intro handout (This is a PostScript file; because there are no PostScript previewers on the uAPE machines yet due to an operating system upgrade this summer, you'll have to print this out), account slips, and the general uAPE handout. Note: the cheating policy has changed, and the handout is incorrect. See the class home page for the current policy.

To download the PostScript file to disk instead of trying to use ``ghostview'' to preview it (ghostview is not available right now), click on the Options menu of Netscape, select General Preferences, and click on the Helpers tab. Scroll down the list until you see application/postscript, click on that to select it, then click on the Edit... button. Change the handle by option to save to disk (instead of Application with command ghostview %s). You'll probably want to restore this back to Application when ghostview becomes available, or change it to pageview %s when that program becomes usable.

You should also preview the spim documentation. Unfortunately, until a PostScript previewer is installed, you'll either have to print the PostScript file out or preview it using the converted GIFs (do not print the GIF files -- it takes much longer to print the GIF files than the PostScript, and will unnecessarily will tie up the printers; if you must print, print the PostScript version:

You'll need to be able to easily preview it before a ``real'' assignment is given out, if a better way to view it isn't available, I'll see about dropping this off at a campus copy center.

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bsy@cse.ucsd.edu, last updated Wed Oct 16 22:37:32 PDT 1996.

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