ECS154B Midterm Review

Midterm is Comprehensive.  What should you know?  Everything in Chapters 1, 2,
4 and 5 of the book, plus what is in Appendix C and Appendix D (1-3), as
well as  what was covered in class. If you have attended class, done the
reading and the lab assignments, you should be in good shape.  

Midterm will be closed book, but you can bring along 1 page of notes. As stated 
in class, emphasis will be on how well you know the material, and in particular 
how well you can solve problems. Expect to see problems very much like the
problems in the chapters, because they are not only illustrative but they also
have answers that you can check your work on.

Review of what we have covered so far: 

Chapter 1:  Primarily review
	Different types of machines
	Different types of languages (High level, assembler, etc.)
	Interesting information about the components of real machines
	Information on how chips are built

Chapter 2:  More review (basically, a single chapter review of ECS50)
	How instructions work 
	How hardware works
	How instructions are represented

Appendix D.1, D.2, D.3, and in-class:
	More detailed investigation of instruction sets
	How instruction set design influences hardware decisions

Chapter 3:  We will do this later.

Chapter 4:  Performance
	Defining performance (throughput vs response time)
	Measuring performance
	    Wall time, system time, CPU time, etc.
	    Time do do what?  (representative programs ...)
	Reporting performance
	    MIPS, MFLOPS, etc.
	    Arithmetic mean, geometric mean, normalization
	Improving performance
	    performance equation, what the different terms represent
	    Amdahl's law

Chapter 5:  Design of single cycle and multicycle processor
	Datapath design
	Single cycle implementation
	Multicycle implementation
	Exceptions
	Microprogramming (section 5.7 on CD)

Appendix C: Mapping control to hardware
	More about microcoding in here ...