CS4200/5200: Reading Assignment #1


1) Read the Appendix K "Survey of Instruction Set Architectures" of the text book Computer Architecture, 5th edition. You can find it online. You can find it at the Web link. You may omit the materials related to the floating point and multimedia operations.

The questions you have to answer by reading it are the following:

  1. Briefly describe the major similarities of the RISC architectures for Deskops/Servers.

  2. Briefly describe the unique features of MIPS 64, Alpha, PowerPC, and PA-RISC 2.0.

  3. What are the key differences betweeen MIPS ISA and MIPS 16 ISA?

  4. IBM 360/370 is a classic that set standards for many instruction sets to follow. Please list 5 of those standards.

  5. What are the four major categories of MIPS Core Instructions?

  6. What and Where are those four condition code bits used by SPARC ISA for Compare and Condition Branch? How MIPS ISA supports the Compare and Condition Branch?

  7. What are data memory addressing modes that are in 80x86 ISA but NOT in MIPS ISA?

  8. Regarding to 80x86 Instruction Encoding, what are the maximum length of 8086 instructions and 80386 instructions, respectively?
(2) Write a report (about 2-3 pages in Word or PDF) on a comprehensive comparison of RISC and CISC architectures based on your understanding (suppose the audiance of your report is going to take CS4200). You may read the Appendix J and search WWW for more information. However, you must use your own language to write the report.

Links of "How to read a research paper"