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Little Computer 3, or LC-3, is a type of computer educational programming language, an assembly language, which is a type of low-level programming language.. It features a relatively simple instruction set, but can be used to write moderately complex assembly programs, and is a viable target for a C compiler.
An instruction set architecture (ISA) is an abstract model of a computer, also referred to as computer architecture.A realization of an ISA is called an implementation.An ISA permits multiple implementations that may vary in performance, physical size, and monetary cost (among other things); because the ISA serves as the interface between software and hardware.
The first was the CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer), which had many different instructions. In the 1970s, however, places like IBM did research and found that many instructions in the set could be eliminated. The result was the RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer), an architecture that uses a smaller set of instructions.
A full system simulator or virtual platform for the future hardware typically includes one or more instruction set simulators. To simulate the machine code of another hardware device or entire computer for upward compatibility. For example, the IBM 1401 was simulated on the later IBM/360 through use of microcode emulation.
Before the RISC philosophy became prominent, many computer architects tried to bridge the so-called semantic gap, i.e., to design instruction sets that directly support high-level programming constructs such as procedure calls, loop control, and complex addressing modes, allowing data structure and array accesses to be combined into single instructions.
In computer science, instruction selection is the stage of a compiler backend that transforms its middle-level intermediate representation (IR) into a low-level IR. In a typical compiler, instruction selection precedes both instruction scheduling and register allocation; hence its output IR has an infinite set of pseudo-registers (often known as temporaries) and may still be – and typically ...
The operating systems that run on these architectures make extensive use of this instruction to facilitate process (i.e., system and user tasks) and processor (i.e., central processors) parallelism while eliminating, to the greatest degree possible, the "disabled spinlocks" which had been employed in earlier IBM operating systems.
Most instructions have the symbolic form OP X,Y,Z, where OP specifies the sort of instruction, X specifies the register used to store the result of the instruction and the rest specify the operands of the instruction. Each of these fields is eight bits wide. For example, ADD $0,$1,3 means "Set $0 to the sum of $1 and 3."