The Hardware/ Software Interface Class

Course text book: Computer Systems

The Big Theme

• The hardware/ software interface
• How does the h/w(0s and 1s, processor executing instructions) relate to the s/w (Go programs)?
• Computing is about abstractions (but we can’t forget reality)
• What are the abstractions that we use?
• What do YOU need to know about them?
  • When do they break down and you have to peek under the hood?
  • What bugs can they cause and how do you find them?
• Become a better programmer and begin to understand the important concepts that have evolved in building ever more complex computer systems.

Roadmap

1. Memory and data
2. Integers and floats
3. Machine code and C
4. x86 assembly
5. Procedures and stacks
6. Arrays and structs
7. Memory and caches
8. Processes
9. Virtual memory
10. Memory allocation
11. Java/Go vs C

Little theme 1: Representation

• All digital systems represnt everything as 0s and 1s
  • The o and 1 are really two different voltage ranges in the electronics
• Everything includes:
  • Numbers - integers and floating point
  • Character - the building blocks of strings
  • Instructions - the directives to the CPU that make up a program
  • Pointers - addresses of data objects stored away in memory
• These encodings are stored throughout a computer system
  • In registers, caches, memories, disks, etc
• They all need addresses
  • A way to find them
  • Find a new place to put a new item
  • Reclain the place in memory when data no longer needed

Little theme 2: Translation

• There is a big gap between how we thing about programs and data and the 0s and 1s of computers
• Need languages to describe what we mean
• Languages need to be translated one step at a time
  • Word-by-word
  • Phrase structure
  • Grammar
• We know Java/Go as a programming language
  • Have to work our way down to the 0s and 1s of computers
  • Try not to lose anything in translation!
  • We’ll encounter Java/Go byte-code, C language, assembly language, and machine code (for the X86 family of CPU architectues)

Little theme 3: Control flow

• How do computers orchestrate the many things they are doing - seemingly in parallel
• What do we have to keep track of when we call a method, and then another, and then another, and so on
• How do we know what to do upon “return”
• How do we run multiple user programs and let them share a sigle computer and memory

Basics of architecture, machine programming

• What is an ISA (Instruction Set Architecture)?
• History of Intel processors and architectures
• C, assembly, machine code
• x86 basics: registers

Translation Impacts Performance

Program lifetime illustration

• The time required to execute a program depends on:
  • The program.
  • The compiler: what set of assember instructions it translates the program into.
  • The instruction set architecture (ISA): what set of instructions it makes available to the compiler.
  • The hardware implementation: how much time it takes to execute an instruction.

Instruction Set Architectures

• The ISA defines:
  • The system’s state (e.g. registers, memory, program counter)
  • The instructions the CPU can execute
  • The effect that each of these instructions will have on the system state

General ISA Design Decisions

1. Instructions
   • What instructions are available? What do they do?
   • How are they encoded? (eg 32bits, 64bits)
2. Registers
   • How many registers are there?
   • How wide are they?
3. Memory(addressing modes)
   • How do you specify a memory location?

x86

• Processors that implement the x86 ISA completely dominate the server, desktop and laptop markets
• Evolutionary design
  • Backwards compatibility up until 8086, introduced in 1978
  • Added more features as time goes on
• Complex instruction set computer (CISC)
  • Many different instructions with many different formats
    • But, only small subset encountered with Linux programs
  • (as opposed to Reduced Instruction Set Computers (RISC), which use simpler instructions)

Intel x86 Evolution: Milestones

Name	Date	Transistors	MHz
8086	1978	29k	5-10

• First 16-bit processor. Basis for IBM PC & DOS
• 1MB address space

Name	Date	Transistors	MHz
386	1985	275k	16-33

• First 32 bit processor, referred to as IA32
• Added “flat addressing”
• Capable of running Unix
• 32-bit Linux/gcc targets i386 by default

Name	Date	Transistors	MHz
Pentium 4F	2005	230M	2800-3800

• First 64-bit Intel x86 processor, referred to as x86-64

Intel x86 Processors

Machine Evolution
486	1989
Pentium	1993
Pentium/MMX	1997
PentiumPro	1995
Pentium III	1999
Pentium 4	2001
Core 2 Duo	2006
Core i7	2008

Integer & Floating Point Numbers

• Representation of integers: unsigned and signed

• Unsigned and signed integers in C

• Arithmetic and shifting

• Sign extension

• Background: fractional binary numbers

• IEEE floating-point standard

• Floating-point operations and rounding

• Floating-point in C

Encoding

• How about encoding a standard deck of playing cards?
• 52 cards in 4 suits
  • How do we encode suits, face cards?
• What operations do we want to make easy to implement?
  • Which is the higher value card?
  • Are they the same suit?

Two possible representation