Instruction

interpreter: is a group of
electrical circuits that perform the
intent of instructions fetched from
memory.
Location Counter: Also called Program
Counter or Instruction Counter, denotes
location of current instruction executed.
Instruction Register: Stores copy of the
current instruction.

 Working

Registers: Memory Devices

that serve as a scratch pad for
instruction interpreter.
General Registers: Used by the
programmer as storage location for
special functions.

 Memory

Address Register: Contains

address of memory location where to
write or read something.
Memory Buffer Register: Contains
the contents of address specified by
MAR, before writing or after reading
from it.

 Memory

Controller: Is hardware that

transfers data between MBR and
core memory location.
I/O Channels: These interpret special
instructions for input or output of the
information from the memory.

Specific Details may vary from

computer to computer, discussed
one is the conventional machine
structure.

For Programming at machine level,

following
questions
must
be
answered:
1.Memory: What is the basic unit, size
and addressing scheme of memory?
2.Registers: How Many Registers are
there? What are their size, function
and interrelationship?

3.Data: What types of the data can be

handled? How is this data stored?
4.Instructions: What are the classes of
instructions on the machine? What are
their formats? How are they stored?
5.Special Features: What is the interrupt
structure of the machine? What type of
protection mechanism is available?

 Units:

Basic memory units is byte i.e.

each
addressable
location
in
memory can contain 8 bits of
information.
To
operate
on
contiguous locations Halfword, word
or doubleword are used.
Size: about 224 bytes.
Addressing Scheme:
Address=value of an offset+contents
of a base register+contents of an
index register;

 16

general purpose registers of 32 bits

each
4 floating point registers, 64 bits each.
A 64 bit Program Status Word that
holds value of location counter,
protection information and interrupt
status.
e.g. A

1,901(2,15)

 Advantages

Addressing:

of Base Register

Convenient Relocation.
Efficient Addressing Mechanism.

Disadvantage:
Overhead

associated with formation of

addresses.
A 12 bit offset can not move more than
4095 location away from base register,
without changing contents of base register
and using and index register.

Groups of bits are interpreted by a 360

processor in several ways.
All data and instructions are stored as a
sequence of binary ones and zeros.
For convenience binary numbers are stored
as hexadecimals.
The prefixes X and B indicate mode of
representation.
Fixed point numbers can be stored as either
halfword or fullword.
A 360 allows to store numbers in binary
formats e.g. 12 can be written in one byte
where 4 bytes show 1(0001) and rest 4
bytes 2(0010)

The 360 has arithmetic, logical, control or

special interrupt instructions.
There are types of instructions differ basically
in the types of the operands they use.
Register Operands refer to data stored in
one of the 16 general registers.
Storage operands refer to data stored in
core memory. The length of data depends
upon data type.
Immediate Operands are single byte of data
and are stored as part of the instruction.