Lecture 11

The MIPS Architecture

11.1

A Little Bit of History

John Louis von Neumann
Born 28 December 1903, Budapest, Hungary; died 8 February 1957, Washington DC. Promoter of concepts which have led to the development of has become known as the von Neumann Architecture.

11.2

The von Neumann Architecture

Define the computer as a collection of four main subsystems: bus Processor (CPU) Memory Control Unit ALU GEEK Input-Output

program and data

A program is consists of a stream of instructions which are stored in memory. The program is executed by sequentially fetching instructions from memory and carrying them out according to specification. 11.3

Memory and Addressing

address

32-bit word = 4 bytes

Byte addressable

0x000000 0x000004 0x000008 0x00000c 0x000010 0x000014 0x000018 0x00001c

0x000000 0x000001 0x000002 0x000003 0x000004 0x000005 0x000006

. . .
11.4

Words start at addresses that are a multiple of 4 (alignment)

Endian Conventions
word address

0x00000c 0x00000c
byte address

MSB LSB

LSB MSB

BIG Endian LITTLE Endian

0x00000c 0x00000d 0x00000e 0x00000f

Example: store 0x00010203 according to little endian and to a big endian conventions,
0x00 0x03 0x01 0x02 0x02 0x01 0x03 0x00

BIG Endian LITTLE Endian

11.5

0x00000c 0x00000d 0x00000e 0x00000f

The MIPS Architecture

Its a RISC architecture:
Reduced Instruction Set Computer: less number of instructions (stick to the basics, complex operations are made up of blocks of simple instructions). Counter example: the x86 family is CISC.

Its a load and store architecture:

Only two kinds of instructions can access memory: loads and stores.

11.6