Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Computer Function
Micro-Operations
the lowest level atomic operations that a computer performs are micro
operations
at each stage during the instruction cycle, a series of micro operations are
performed
for example, the execution cycle has various different sets of micro operations
to perform the various arithmetic and logic operations
the fetch cycle is responsible for setting up the instructions - next, the
operands of the instruction must be fetched from memory
the process can be quiet involved, as an instruction may have several operands
spanning several memory cells
basically this step involves converting "indirect" addresses (like variables) to
"direct" addresses specifying the exact location in memory at which to find the
data
in short, the actions of the Indirect cycle are:
o for each of the operands which need to be decoded:
perform a series of memory reads (in the style of the fetch
cycle)
replace the indirect addresses with direct addresses
for each op code, a particular sequence of micro operations are performed (the
sequence will be different for each op code)
for example, there may be an op code for the assembly instruction: ADD R0,
X
o the fetch cycle & the indirect cycle would have already loaded the
instruction and converted the address of X to a direct address (if
necessary)
o next, the micro code for the add instruction would be performed:
move the address of X into MAR
Loads the value from memory at the address into the register
ADD0 register
Adds the contents of the register to the register R0, the result is stored in R0
SUBTRACT0 register
Subtracts the contents of the register from the register R0, the result is stored
in R0
JUMP address
Self-Assessment Questions
1. What are the basic stages of the fetch-execute cycle?
2. List 2 registers that are critical to the fetch-execute cycle.
stop
if R0 > 0 PC = PC - 3
R0 = R1
R2 = R0 + R1
R0 = 4
R1 = R0 - 1