Unit 4 CPU and Register Organization

Structure:

4.1 Introduction

Objectives

4.2 Registers

User-Visible Registers

Control and Status Registers

Program Status Word (PSW)

4.3 CPU Organization

Fundamental Computer Architecture

CPU organization in 8085 microprocessor

4.4 Register Organization of different machine

The Zilog Z8000 machine

Intel 8086 machine

Motorola 68000 machine

4.5 Instruction cycles

Basic instruction cycle

Basic instruction Cycle state diagram

4.6 Summary

4.7 Terminal Questions

4.8 Answers

4.1 Introduction

As discussed in the previous unit a CPU consists of a set of registers that function as a level of memory above Main memory and Cache memory. The registers in the CPU are of two types:

· User-visible Registers: These enable the machine or assembly language programmer to minimize main memory references by use of registers.

· Control and Status Registers: These are used by the control unit to control the operation of the CPU and by privileged operating system programs to control the execution of programs.

Note: Sometimes there is no clear separation of registers into these categories. For example, on some of the machines the register called Program Counter (PC) is user visible, that is, user can see the contents of PC, but on some machines it is invisible to the user.

Objectives:

By the end of Unit 4, the learners should be able to:

1. Explain the register organization of any basic computer.

2. Explain status word, program counter registers.

3. Discuss the register organization of Intel 8085 microprocessor and compare with other machines.

4. Explain the different phases of basic instruction cycle.

4.2 Registers

User-Visible Registers

User visible registers are those registers that are used by the user in the machine language and can be executed by the CPU. All CPU designs provide a number of user visible registers. These registers can be categorized into following different types:

· General Purpose Registers: They can be assigned a variety of functions by the programmer. The general purpose registers can be considered for orthogonal usage and non-orthogonal usage.

-If any general purpose register can contain the operand for any opcode then we refer the use of general purpose as orthogonal usage.

-Sometimes the use of general purpose register is restricted. For example, there may be dedicated registers that are used for floating point operations. Then we refer to the use of general purpose as non orthogonal usage.

· Data registers: They can only be used to hold data, and cannot be employed in the calculation of an operand address.

· Address registers: They may be used either in general purpose addressing modes, or may be devoted to a particular addressing mode.

-Segment Pointers: In a machine CPU with segmented addressing, a register holds the address of the base of a segment. There may be multiple segment registers. For example, one for the operating system, one for the current process.

For example, Intel 8086 family has different segments and they are referred to as

1) code segment: where the code is written

2) data segment: where the data is placed

3) stack segment: acts like a stack

4) extra segment

Thus there may be many registers one for operating system and one for the current process.

-Index Registers: These are used for indexed addressing, and may be auto indexed.

-Stack Pointer: If there is a user-visible stack addressing, then typically the stack is in memory and there is a dedicated register that points to the top of the stack. This allows implicit addressing, that is push, pop and other stack instructions need not contain an explicit stack operand.

· Condition codes: These are least partially visible register types. They are also referred to as flags. The bits of Flag register are set according to the result of an operation. There can be Zero flag, Carry flag, etc., that indicate whether the result is zero or the result produced an overflow, respectively.

Example: Consider the length of all registers to be two bits long. The result of adding two binary numbers 10 and 11 will be 101. That is

1) The result will be stored in a destination register which will be 01.

2) And the carry is set as there is overflow after execution.

Control and Status Registers

These registers are employed to control the operation of the CPU.

Four registers are essential to instruction execution:

· Program Counter (PC): It contains the address of an instruction to be fetched.

· Instruction Register (IR): It contains the instruction most recently fetched.

· Memory Address Register (MAR): It contains the address of a location in memory.

· Memory Buffer Register (MBR): It contains a word of data to be written to memory or the word most recently read.

These four registers are used for the movement of data between the CPU and memory.

Within the CPU, data must be presented to the ALU for processing. The ALU may have direct access to the MBR and user-visible registers. Alternatively, there may be additional buffering registers at the boundary to the ALU; and these registers serve as input and output registers for the ALU and exchange data with MBR and user-visible registers. This depends on the design of the CPU and ALU.

Program Status Word (PSW):

It contains status information. PSW typically contains condition codes plus other status information. Some of these may be user visible. Common flags include:

· Sign: contains the sign bit of the result of the last arithmetic operation.

· Zero: set when the result is 0.

· Carry: set if an operation resulted in a carry (addition) into or borrow (subtraction) out of the high-order bit.

· Equal: set if logical compare result is equality.

· Overflow: used to indicate arithmetic overflow.

· Interrupt enable/disable: used to enable or disable interrupts.

· Supervisor: Indicates whether the CPU is executing in supervisor mode or user mode. Certain privilege instructions can be executed only in supervisor mode (e.g. halt instruction), and certain areas of memory can be accessed only in supervisor mode.

4.3 CPU organization

Figure 4.1: CPU with System Bus

As discussed earlier CPU which is the heart of a computer consists of Registers, Control Unit and Arithmetic Logic Unit. The interconnection of these units is achieved through the system bus as shown in figure 4.1.

The following tasks are to be performed by the CPU:

1. Fetch instructions: The CPU must read instructions from the memory.

2. Interpret instructions: The instructions must be decoded to determine what action is required.

3. Fetch data: The execution of an instruction may require reading data from memory or an I/O module.

4. Process data: The execution of an instruction may require performing some arithmetic or logical operations on data.

5. Write data: The results of an execution may require writing data to the memory or an I/O module.

Fundamental Computer Architectures

Here we describe the most common Computer Architectures, all of which use stored program control concept.

The three most popular computer architectures are:

1) The Stack Machine

2) The Accumulator Machine

3) The Load / Store Machine

The Stack Machine

A stack machine implements a stack with registers. The operands of the ALU are always the top two registers of the stack and the result from the ALU is stored in the top register of the stack. Examples of the stack machine include Hewlett-Packard RPN calculators and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

Figure 4.2: The Stack Machine Architecture

The advantage of a stack machine is that it can shorten the length of instructions since operands are implicit. This was important when memory was expensive (20–30 years ago). Now, in Java, it is important since we want to ship executables (class files) over the network.

The Accumulator Machine

An accumulator machine has a special register, called an accumulator, whose contents are combined with another operand as input to the ALU, with the result of the operation replacing the contents of the accumulator.

accumulator = accumulator [op] operand;

Figure 4.3: The Accumulator Machine Architecture

In fact, many machines have more than one accumulator

Pentium: 1, 2, 4 or 6 (depending on how you count)

MC68000: 16

In order to add two numbers in memory,

1) Place one of the numbers into the accumulator (load operand)

2) Execute the add instruction

3) Store the contents of the accumulator back into memory (store operand)

The Load/Store Machine

Registers: Provide faster access but are expensive.

Memory: Provides slower access but is less expensive.

A small amount of high speed memory (expensive), called a register file, is provided for frequently accessed variables and a much larger but slower memory (less expensive) is provided for the rest of the program and data. (SPARC: 32 register at any one time)

This is based on the principle of “locality" – at a given time, a program typically accesses a small number of variables much more frequently than others.

Figure 4.4: The Load / Store Machine Architecture

The machine loads and stores the registers from memory. The arithmetic and logic instructions operate with registers, not main memory, for the location of operands.

Since the machine addresses only a small number of registers, the instruction field to refer to a register (operand) is short; therefore, these machines frequently have instructions with three operands:

ADD src1, src2, dest

EXAMPLE MACHINE INSTRUCTIONS

y = y+10

 y¢ º &y

[y¢] º *&y¢ = *& y = y

Stack Machine     Accumulator Machine      Load / Store Machine                                                 

Push [y¢]                                Load [y¢]                             Load r0, [y¢]

Push 10                                 Add 10                               Load r1, 10

Add                                       Store y’                               Add r0, r1, r2

Pop y’                                                                               Store r2, y’          

CPU organization of 8085 microprocessor

In the following sections we will take a look at the CPU organization in Intel 8085. We will study the register organization and their relationship with other components in a relatively simple Intel 8085.The Intel 8085 CPU organization is as shown in figure 4.5.

The CPU of 8085 is organized around a single 8-bit internal bus. Connected to the Bus are the following components.

1. Accumulator: Used as a temporary buffer to store input to the ALU. It is also user visible and is addressed in some instructions.

2. Temporary register: Used as input for ALU this is other than Accumulator.

3. Flags: These are nothing but condition codes. The result of ALU operations are related back in the register as flags.

Figure 4.5: Intel 8085 CPU organization

The different flag bits supported by the 8085 CPU are:

1. Z: It stands for Zero Flag. This bit is set when the result of ALU operation is zero. That is result = zero implies Z=1 and result = non zero implies Z=0.

2. S: It stands for Sign Flag. This bit is set when the result of ALU operation is negative

That is result = negative implies S=1 and result = non negative implies

S=0

3. P: It stands for Parity Flag. This bit is set when the result of ALU operation results in even parity. That is the result when expressed in binary has even number of ones in it.

That is result contains even number of ones implies even parity P=1 and result contains odd number of ones implies odd parity P=0

4. CY: It stands for Carry Flag. This bit is set when the result of ALU operation results in overflow.

That is result contains overflow implies carry flag (CY) =1 and result does not contain overflow implies CY=0

5. AC: It stands for Auxiliary Carry Flag. This bit is set when the result of

ALU operation results in carry between fourth and fifth bit.

That is result contains carry from fourth to fifth bit implies AC = 1 and result contains carry from fourth to fifth bit implies AC =0

4. ALU output: The result of an operation is placed on the bus.

5. Instruction register: It is loaded from the memory buffer register (MBR) through the Bus. The instruction is brought into CPU through the address/data buffer and internal CPU bus to the instruction register. Then it is decoded here and executed by the control unit.

6. Register Array: It is a collection of registers that are user visible and help to store the operands or result of the operation.

The register array contains five 16-bit registers. The B – C, D – E, H – L register, Stack pointer and program register.

1. The first three types of registers can be treated as a single 16 bit register each or two 8-bit registers each. That is B, C, D, E, H, L are six registers which are 8-bit long.

2. Stack pointer is a 16-bit that points to the location of stack memory. This is used for stack oriented machines.

3. Program counter is 16 bit that points to the current location of the memory where the instructions are to be written. It is moved to the MAR (address plus address/data buffers) to begin the fetching of the next instruction.

Any of these registers may be loaded, 8-bits at a time, from the internal bus or transferred to the address buffer or address/data buffer. Also any of the 16-bit registers can be transferred to the MAR that connects to the external address bus.

7. Address/data Buffer: This buffer connects to multiplexed bus lines. Some of the time, this buffer acts as a memory buffer register (MBR) to exchange data with the system bus. At other times it acts as the low order 8-bits of a memory address register (MAR). This multiplexing allows additional pins that are available for control signals to the system bus.

8. Address buffer: Used as a high order 8 bits of the MAR.

Let us consider an instruction ADD B as an example to study the sequence of actions that takes place.

· This instruction causes the contents of register B to be added to the contents of the accumulator.

· To execute this instruction, the control unit moves the contents of register B to the temporary register.

· The ALU performs the add operation on its inputs.

· The result is placed on the internal CPU bus and copied into the accumulator.

· The ALU also updates the flags to reflect the results of add.

4.4 Register Organization of different machines

It is very much instructive to examine and compare the register organization of comparable systems. In this section we will discuss the register organization of 16-bit microprocessors that were developed more or less at the same time.

The Zilog Z8000

Figure 4.6 depicts the register organization of Z8000 machine. Here only purely internal registers structure is given and memory address registers are not shown.

Figure 4.6: Zilog Z8000 register organization

Z8000 consists of sixteen 16-bit general purpose registers, which can be used for data, address and indexing. The designers of this machines felt that it was useful to provide a regularized, general set of registers than to save instruction bits by using special purpose registers. Further the way the functions are assigned to these registers is the responsibility of the programmer. There might be different functional breakdown for different applications.

A segmented address space uses 7-bit segment number and a 16-bit offset. It uses two registers to hold a single address. There are two other registers called stack pointers that are necessary for stack module. One register used for system mode and one for normal mode.

Z8000 consists of five other registers that are related to program status. Two registers hold the program counter and two registers hold the address of a program status area in the memory. A 16-bit flag register called Flag control word holds various flags status and control bits.

Intel 8086

The approach taken by Intel for register organization is different than Z8000 machine and is as shown in Figure 4.7.

Figure 4.7: Intel 8086 register organization

In this machine every register is a special purpose register. There are some registers that also serve as general purpose registers. The 8086 machine contains four 16-bit data registers that are accessible on a byte or 16-bit basis. It also has four 16-bit pointers and index registers. The data registers can be used as general purpose registers in some instructions. In others registers are used implicitly.

Example: A multiply instruction always uses accumulator. The four pointer registers each with segment offset are also used in a number of operations implicitly. There are also four segment registers. Three of these segment registers are used in a dedicated, implicit way to point to the segment of the current instruction, a segment containing data and a segment containing a stack. This type of structure is useful in branch operations. The dedicated and implicit uses provide for compact encoding at the cost of reduced flexibility. The 8086 also includes an instruction pointer and a set of 1 bit status and control flags.

The Motorola MC68000

Figure 4.8: MC68000 register organization

This machine uses a structure that falls between the Zilog Z8000 and Intel 8086. The register organization of MC68000 is as shown in figure 4.8

The MC6800 machine partitions the 32-bit registers into eight data registers and nine address registers. The data registers are used in data manipulations and are also used in addressing only as index registers. The width of data register allows 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit data operations depending upon the opcode.

The address registers contain a 32-bit address. It does not support segmentation. Two of the address registers are used as stack pointers: One for the users and one for the operating system, depending upon the current execution mode. Both the stack pointers are numbered as seven i.e., A7 as only one can be used at a time. The MC68000 also has program counter and status register as in the other two machines. The program counter is 32-bit register and status register is 16-bit. Like Zilog the Motorola team also supports a regular instruction set with no special purpose registers. For the purpose of code efficiency they divided the registers into functional components, saving one bit at each registers.

4.5 Instruction Cycles

The basic function performed by a computer is program execution. The program to be executed consists of a set of instructions stored in memory. The CPU does the actual work by executing the instructions written in the program.

Basic Instruction cycle

To understand the ways the major components of a computer or rather CPU interact to execute a program, consider the flow chart as shown in figure 4.9.

Figure 4.9: Basic instruction cycle

The processing required for a single instruction is called an instruction cycle. Referring to the above figure 4.9, the basic instruction cycle can be assumed to consist of two steps:

1. The CPU reads or fetches instructions from memory one at a time.

2. Then this single instruction is executed.

The program execution consists of repeating these two steps of instruction fetch and instruction execution until the end of the program.

Thus the instruction cycles consists of fetch cycle and execute cycle.

The execution of program itself may involve a number of steps. The instruction fetch is a common operation for every instruction, and consists of reading an instruction from a location in memory. The instruction may involve several operations depending upon the nature of the instructions. In any CPU we have seen that there is a register called program counter that keeps track of the instructions to be fetched next from the memory. CPU always increments the PC after each instruction fetch so that it will fetch the next instructions in sequence.

The fetched instruction is stored in a register in the CPU known as instruction register. The instruction is in the form of binary code that specifies what action has to be taken by the CPU. The CPU interprets the instruction and performs the required action.

Example: If PC = [300] that is PC is set to 300 location of memory. If there are three instructions in a program and next subsequent instructions are placed say 303, 304 and end or Halt at 306. Then discuss the steps involved in execution of this program.

Solution:

1. First of all the instruction that is present at location 300 in memory is loaded into IR .At the same time PC is incremented by 3 as the next instruction is at 303.

2. Depending on the instruction that is decoded, it finds that operands are to be read from memory (as the next instruction is at 303 implies that the operands of first instruction may be placed at 301 and 302)

3. Then the instruction is executed.

4. Then again reads the instruction from 303 into IR and update PC=304.

5. Decodes the instruction and Executes. (Now operands are definitely not specified in memory as the next instruction is at 304.)

6. The third instruction is read into IR from location 304 as PC=304 and now PC updates with 306.

7. Decodes the instruction and may find operand in memory location hence gets operands from memory at 305.

8. and then executes the instruction

9. Finally now the next instruction is at 306 so it is read in IR and PC=307

10. Decodes this instruction which is halt

11. Executes it which terminates the execution of the program.

The following is one view of the instruction cycles:

· Fetch the instruction:

    =>Place it in a holding area called IR.

    =>Update the program counter (PC).

· Execute the instruction:

    =>Decode the instruction:

        -Perform address translation.

        -Fetch operands from memory.

    =>Perform the required calculation.

    =>Store results in registers or memory.

    =>Set status flags attached to the CPU.

The required action performed by the CPU falls into four categories.

1. CPU-Memory: Data may be transferred from the CPU to memory or from memory to CPU

2. CPU-I/O: Data may be transferred to/from the outside world by transferring between CPU and I/O module.

3. Data processing: The CPU may perform some arithmetic or logic operations on data.

4. Control: An instruction may specify the sequence of execution be altered. For example, jump instruction.

Consider for example that the program is written from location 300 to 320 in the memory. Now if the instruction present at say 305 is something like jump to 310. When the program is executed the instruction located at 300 to 305 are executed in sequence one at a time. Then after the execution of instruction jump to 310, the CPU has updated the PC=310. Hence the next instruction that is fetched will be from 310 and so on.

Basic Instruction Cycle State diagram

These are the detailed states occurring during the fetch and execution cycles are as shown in figure 4.10. A few of them occur only once and a few occur multiple times.

Figure 4.10: Instruction Cycle State Diagram

The different possible states occurring in Instruction cycle are:

· Instruction Address Calculation (IAC): Determine the address of the next instruction to be executed. Usually, this involves adding a fixed number to the address of the previous instruction. For example, if each instruction is 16 bits long and memory is organized into 16-bits words, then add 1 to the previous address. If, instead memory is organized as individually addressable 8-bit bytes, then add 2 to the previous address.

· Instruction Fetch (IF): Read instruction from its memory location into the processor.

· Instruction Operation Decoding (IOD): Analyze instruction to determine type of operation to be performed and operand(s) to be used.

· Operand Address Calculation (OAC): If the operation involves reference to an operand in memory or available via I/O, then determine the address of the operand.

· Operand Fetch (OF): Fetch the operand from memory or read it in, from I/O.

· Data Operation (DO): Perform the operation indicated in the instruction.

· Operand Store (OS): Write the result into memory or out to I/O.

During the instruction cycles, Instruction address calculation, Instruction fetch and Instruction operation decoding are performed only once, but operand address calculation and operand fetch may happen multiple times. Data operation is performed once, and Operand store with the combination of Operand address calculation may be performed zero or more times depending on the instruction.

4.6 Summary

We know that CPU consists of a set of registers that function as a level of memory. Here we have discussed the different types of registers like user visible registers, control registers or flag registers and so on. We have also introduced the basic instruction cycle so as to get a feel of how exactly these registers are used in the execution of the instruction. As a case study we have seen the detail register organization of few machines like Zilog Z8000, Intel 8086 and Motorola 68000 microprocessors.

Self Assessment Questions

1. CPU consists of a set of registers that function as a level of memory above ______________.

2. ______________ enable the machine or assembly language programmer to minimize main memory references by use of registers.

3. Flags of 8085 are nothing but ______________.

4. ______________ number of flag bits is defined in 8085.

5. The processing required for a single instruction is called an ______________ .

4.7 Terminal Questions

1. List and explain the various condition flags of the Intel 8085 microprocessor.

2. Explain the register organization of 8086.

3. Compare the register organization of 8085, Z8000 and MC68000.

4.8 Answers

Self Assessment Questions:

1. main memory and cache memory

2. user visible registers

3. conditional codes

4. five

5. instruction cycle

Terminal Questions:

1. Refer Section 4.3

2. Refer Section 4.4

3. Refer Section 4.4