CS 3843 Computer Organization Midterm Exam 1 Review: Fall 2010

This will be a closed book exam.
You may use a calculator, but you need to show the steps in solving the problems, not just write down the answer.
The calculator can be used only for add, subtract, multiply, and divide, plus to check your answers.
Any other operations must be shown.

You are responsible for understanding all of assignments and material from the textbook.
The exam will cover Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 through Section 3.3.

Many of the problems on the exam will be similar to recitation problems and the daily questions.

The exam will probably have about 30 short answer questions worth 2 points each and some longer questions for a total of 100 points.
For the short answer questsions there will not be any partial credit and only the answer will be graded.
For the other questions you must show your work and partial credit may be given.

Less than 20% of the exam will be on material from Chapter 3.

  1. Know your powers of 2.
  2. Base conversions
  3. Little endian and big endian
  4. Bitwise boolean operators
  5. Logical operators
  6. Shift operators: understand the difference between arithmetic and logical shifts
  7. Representation of integers: 2's complement, 1s' complement, sign-magnitude
  8. Casting between signed and unsigned
  9. Casting between integers of different sizes and sign extension
    Note: In C, when a cast changes both sign type and size, the sign type is done first.
  10. unsigned addition and subtraction
  11. signed addition and subtraction (2's complement only)
  12. unsigned multiplication
  13. 2's complement multiplication
  14. Multiplying by constants using shift, add, and subtract
  15. Dividing by powers of 2
  16. Fractional binary numbers - converting between bases
  17. IEEE floating point format with given number of exp and frac bits
    For given number of exp and frac bits:
    1. find smallest denormalized greater than 0
    2. find largest denormalized
    3. find smallest normalized greater than 0
    4. find largest normalized
    5. Given the binary:
      • find the sign, exp, and frac bits
      • determine whether it is nan, inf, denormalized, or normalized
      • find the value
    6. Given a value:
      • determine whether it will be represented as denormalized, normalized, or infinity.
      • find the representation
  18. Understand the four rounding methods.
  19. IA32
    1. Know about the 8 32-bit registers
    2. Understand how the stack works: grows down, sp points to last value pushed
    3. Understand the following instructions:
      pushl and popl
      movl, addl, subl
    4. Understand the following addressing modes:
      Immediate, Register, Indirect, Base+Displacement, Scaled Indexed
    5. Understand how base+displacement addressing is used to access items on the stack.