Midterm Review topics

You should be able to handle problems in any of the following areas:
  1. Circuits, Karnaugh maps, Boolean logic, Truth tables
  2. Purpose of clocks, basic circuit components, fetch-execute cycle
  3. Data Representation - especially floating point and 2's complement.
  4. Basics of instruction sets. Direct, indirect, immediate addressing. Masking, shifting, arithmetic (including floating point arithmetic).
  5. Programming our two machines - the basic 8-bit SymHymn architecture and the 16-bit machine.
  6. Understanding how subroutines work with the stack.
  7. Cache Memory - determining average access time, understanding how caching works, understanding hit rates, hardware for cache access.
  8. Paged virtual memory - why is it necessary, how does it work, what are page tables, hardware for virtual memory.
  9. Multiprocessing - how it works, how to do simple calculations given processes and queues.