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ENCM 369 Winter 2008 Final Exam Information

Contents

• Exam Time and Location
• Closed-book, no calculators
• Exam Topics
• Exam Format
• Final Exam Instruction Subset
• Reference Material
• Suggestions for preparation

Exam Time and Location

The exam takes place in the Gold Gym from 3:30pm to 6:30pm on Tuesday, April 29.

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Closed-book, no calculators

The exam is closed-book--do not not take any books or notes to your seat. Use of calculators or computers during the exam is not permitted.

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Exam Topics

First, a general principle:

The exam will focus mainly on topics that were heavily emphasized in lectures and labs. We are not going to make a lot of marks depend on topics that were given very little coverage in lectures and labs.

The exam will cover all material up to and including the lectures of Tuesday, April 15, with the following exceptions:

• You will not have to answer questions about how to use xspim.
• You will not have to determine bit patterns for instructions, or determine what instructions correspond to a given bit patterns. However, you should know the formats of the instructions supported by the processors of Chapter 5 of the text.
• You do not need to know gcc options to do such things as run only the compiler, or run only the assembler. However, you should know the role of each tool--preprocessor, compiler, assembler, linker--in the process of building executables on Unix-like systems.

The examination is on the entire course. There will be an emphasis on post-midterm material, but there will also be a significant number of problems concentrating on pre-midterm material.

There may be a small number of marks associated with material in the assigned reading that was not covered in lectures. Let me repeat that the number of marks related to this material will be either zero or very small.

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Exam Format

The exam will consist of many short questions. Questions will be of the following types:

• You will have to write SPIM procedures or other short sequences of SPIM instructions. You may be asked to translate C functions. You may also be asked to write code to perform a specified task without having any C code to work from. When writing code, you must use only the instructions and pseudoinstructions listed in the section below called ``Final Exam Instruction Subset''.
• You will have to draw diagrams and/or predict register and memory contents to show that you know how a given SPIM program works.
• You will have to write some short paragraphs (roughly two or three sentences) to show that you understand key terms and concepts from the course.
• You will have to solve problems related to the single-cycle and multi-cycle processor designs of Chapter 5 of the textbook.
• You will have to solve one or more problems related to caches and virtual memory.

You will write all of your answers on the question paper, in spaces provided for answers.

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Final Exam Instruction Subset

In order to avoid having you spend a lot of time memorizing all of the instructions you have seen so far in the course, all problems that ask you to read or write SPIM code will be set up so that you can solve them with knowledge of a subset of MIPS instructions and pseudoinstructions. This subset is:

add, addi, addu, addiu,
sub, subu,
lw, sw, lb, lbu, sb,
beq, bne,
j, jal, jr,
slt, slti, sltu, sltiu,
la, li,
and, andi, or, ori, nor, sll, srl, lui,
mult, multu, div, divu, mfhi, mflo,
add.s, add.d, sub.s, sub.d,
mul.s, mul.d, div.s, div.d,
mtc1, mfc1,
mov.s, mov.d,
lwc1, ldc1, swc1, sdc1,
c.x.s, c.x.d (where x is one of eq, lt, le),
bc1t, bc1f,
cvt.x.y (where each of x and y is one of d, s, w)

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Reference Material

You will be provided with a few pages of reference material along with the question paper. This material will include:

• The following table of powers of two:

   n              2**n   |     n              2**n
   ----------------------+------------------------
   0                 1   |    16            65,536
   1                 2   |    17           131,072
   2                 4   |    18           262,144
   3                 8   |    19           524,288
   4                16   |    20         1,048,576
   5                32   |    21         2,097,152
   6                64   |    22         4,194,304
   7               128   |    23         8,388,608
   8               256   |    24        16,777,216
   9               512   |    25        33,554,432
  10             1,024   |    26        67,108,864
  11             2,048   |    27       134,217,728
  12             4,096   |    28       268,435,456
  13             8,192   |    29       536,870,912
  14            16,384   |    30     1,073,741,824
  15            32,768   |    31     2,147,483,648
                         |    32     4,294,967,296
        

• A list of all 32 general purpose registers in a MIPS processor.
• A brief summary of IEEE 754 floating-point formats.
• A brief description of the floating-point registers.
• Documentation for all of the instructions in the ``Final Exam Instruction Subset'' listed above.
• Possibly some diagrams copied from Chapter 5 of the textbook.

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Suggestions for preparation

Here are suggestions for review:

• Start preparing as soon as possible. It's much less bad to find gaps in your knowledge ten days before the final than to find them the night before.
• Re-read the assigned sections from the textbook. Pay particularly close attention to material that got heavy coverage in lectures and/or labs.
• Review lecture notes and lab handouts carefully. Many of the `Read This First' sections in lab handouts contain useful information.
• Try to do all of the problems from the old exams (but keep in mind that coverage of topics and styles of assembly language programming have changed in small ways over the years).
• Check the posted solutions to lab problems. Do this even for problems for which you got full marks--your TA may have overlooked a mistake, or the solutions may show approaches that are simpler than yours.
• Re-do lab exercises using pencil and paper, especially those exercises that you found difficult when you first did them. Practice writing complete procedure definitions with pencil and paper--writing code by hand is a bit different from typing code in a text editor, and it's obviously an important skill to develop for tests and exams.
• Review the tutorial exercises.

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