CS 233 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Instruction Set, Powerpc, Central Processing Unit
Document Summary
With an alu and a register le, we can build a calculator. The key feature that distinguishes a computer processor from other digital systems is programmability. A processor is a hardware system controlled by software. An instruction set architecture (isa) describes the interface between the software and the hardware. Di erent processor families (x86, powerpc, arm, mips, ) use their own instruction set architectures x86 - pc, powerpc - console, arm - phase, mips - everything else. The processor we"ll build will execute a subset of the mips isa. Mips is just convenient because it is real, yet simple. Programs written in high-level language like c++ must be compiled to produce an executable program. The result is a cpu-speci c machine language program. This can be loaded into memory and executed by the processor. Machine language serves as the interface between hardware and software. Functions for code abstraction; variables for naming data.
