UNIVERSITY OF ZIMBABWE

2021 May/June Assignment 1

Faculty: Computer Engineering, Informatics and

Communications

Department: COMPUTER SCIENCE

Paper Code and Title: HCT222 Computer Architecture and

Organization

Due date: 04/06/2021 (Latest 11:59pm)

Question 1 [31 marks]

a) Find the binary equivalent of (D3E.A6) 16 and the hex equivalent of
(1011001110.011011101)2. [4 marks]
b) Find the octal equivalent of (BD.C4) 16 and the hex equivalent of (565.013)8
[4 marks]
c) Define addressing modes. Classify and explain with examples. [8 marks]
d) Discuss different types of instruction formats.. [8 marks]
e) Determine the floating-point representation of (−122) 10 using the IEEE single-precision format.
[3 marks]
f) In the von Neumann model, explain the purpose of the processing unit and the program
counter. [4 marks]

1
Question 2 [29 marks]
a) A digital computer has a memory unit with 32 bits per word. The instruction set consists of 110
different operations. All instructions have an operation code part (opcode) and two address
fields: one for a memory address and one for a register address. This particular system includes
eight general purpose, user addressable registers. Registers may be loaded directly from the
memory, and memory may be uploaded directly from the registers. Direct memory-to-memory
data movement operations are not supported. Each instruction is stored in one word of
memory. [2 marks each]
I. How many bits are needed for the opcode?
II. How many bits are needed to specify the register?
III. How many bits are left for the memory address part of the instruction?
IV. What is the maximum allowable size for memory?

b) Outline the main differences between Multithreading and multiprocessing [6 marks]

c) Assembly language
i. Explain why assembly language should be avoided for general application
development. [4 marks]
ii. Under what circumstances is assembly language preferred or required? [3 marks].
iii. Write assembly code in SimpleRisc to compute: 41 / 29 - 40, and save the
result in r4. [4 marks]
iv. Compute 109 * 5.5 with shift operators [4 marks]

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