Welcome to ECE291

Lecture 1

Course Goals

• This course will bridge the gap between your logic classes and programming courses through assembly-level programming of a real (80x86) computer
  
• You will become proficient in assembly-level programming
• You will learn to organize large programs
• You will learn how to interface to hardware (interrupts, timers, sound cards, VGA controller, joystick, parallel and serial chip controllers)

Course Overview

• Review Syllabus
• Review Class Outline
• Review Lab Staffing Schedule
• Assign Homework 0

Todays Topics

• History
• Rapid Changes (Moore's law)
• Review

A very short history and historical perspective

Year	Event
1642	Blaise Pascal invents mechanical calculator (counting device)
1830	Charles's Babbages "Difference Engine" First Steam-powered "Analytical Engine"
1880's	John H. Patterson's Mechanical cash register (NCR) First applications for computing devices
1930's	Claude Shannon: Suggests use of Binary system for use with electronic circuits
1940s	John Von Neumann Proposes reconfigurable computing by storing programs in memory
1940s - 1950s	First electronic computers Vacuum tubes & mechanical relays: UNIVAC, ENIAC 30 tons 150KWatt 80 bytes of memory ILLIAC (Metze et. al. play Illinois fight song on accumulator bit. - first computer music)
1948	John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, William Schockley file patent on invention of the transistor
1958	Jack Kilby introduces concept of "Integrated Circuit"
1960s	Computers begin to use transistors.
1965	Gordon Moore Observes that every chip produced contained roughly twice as much capacity as its predecessor and that chips new generations of chips were being released every 18-24 months.
Late 1960s	IBM mainframes Powerful, centralized CPUs with terminals Age of the "big iron"
1970s	DEC PDP-11s Low-cost Mini-computers Age of the "Vaxen"
1974	Microprocessors Intel introduces the 8080 (a "toy") Bill Gates sophmore year at Harvard
1974	Altair 8800: 8080 CPU Affordable ($379 kit) No screen (LEDs on front panel) No keyboard (DIP switches on front panel) No storage 4k memory. Bill Gates & Paul Allen start writing BASIC
1977	Radio Shack TRS-80 Apple II Commodore-64
1980	IBM meets with Bill Gates to license BASIC/MSDOS (QDOS)
1981	IBM Personal Computer: 16-bit microprocessor: 4.77 MHz 8088 ROM BASIC, cassette interface, 360k floppy (optional) DOS 1.0
1982	Illiac-IV decommissioned
1983	Low cost computing 10 MByte Hard disk costs $3000 640KB of Memory costs $1000 Compaq introduces "Portable Computing"
1984	Macintosh: GUI based on work at Xerox Parc IBM Introduces PC-AT: 80286-based system. Record year for IBM. Lockwood buys first 8088 computer.
1985	First 32-bit 80x86 CPUs Intel introduces 80386 Address up to 4 Gbytes of memory.
1986	First 32-bit 80x86 Systems Compaq introduces first 80386-based system
1989	Intel introduces 80486, includes math co-processor (FPU)
1992	AMD/Cyrix 486 (Compatible CPUs) Intel Pentium (64-bit memory bus)
1995	AMD / Cyrix: 5x86 1 Gigabyte hard drive costs $300 (1000 times cheaper/MB than 1983 !)
1996	Use of Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) core to exectute 80x86 instructions AMD K5 (RISC Ops = ROPS) Intel Pentium Pro Superscalar Execution AMD K5/K6 Cyrix M1 (6x86) Intel Pentium Pro Powerful, Entry-level systems 100 MIP CPUs 32M DRAM 12x CDROM
1997	Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD): Multimedia Extensions / Matrix Math Extensions (MMX) AMD K6, Intel Pentium-II Cyrix/IBM M2 (6x86 MX) Low-Cost computing: 233 Mhz CPU w/MMX: $300 64MB of Memory: $300 (300 times cheaper/MB than 1983 !)
1998	Low-power portable computing Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) for Floating Point operations AMD K6-2 w/3DNow Integrated CPU/Video/Audio: Cyrix/NSM MediaGX Low-Cost computing: 300 MHz CPU w/MMX+3D: $125 64 MB of Memory (PC-100 SDRAM): $75 10 GByte Hard Drive: $200
1999+	More Floating point Parallelism Pentium III (Katmai) Faster Bus Architectures AMD K3-III (3DNow + 256k on-chip Full-speed L2 cache) AMD K7 (Fast Alpha EV-6 Bus) Explicit Instruction-level Floating-point Parallelism: Merced IA-64 (80x86/PA-RISC) Supercomputing on the Microprocessor Ubiquitous Computing Active Networks

Rapid Changes

• Moore's Law. Estimates that the number of transistors/chip doubles every 18 months.
• Exponential Growth!
• Has been true for 20 years!

  

  2^(20 years / 1.5 years/double) = 2^13.3 = 10,000 x performance!

• If we had similar progress in automotive technology, today you could buy a Lexus for about $2. It would travel at the speed of sound, and get about 600 Miles on a thimble of gas. -Randall Tobias: Former Vice Chairman of AT&T.

Review from previous classes

• You should be very familiar with all of the material below.
  The prerequisite for ECE291 is ECE290 or an equivalent class.
  If you don't already understand the material below,
  you probably shouldn't be taking ECE291.
• Number Systems
• Base Conversions
• Signed & Unsigned Numbers

Review of Number Systems

• Base 10 representation (decimal) (0..9):
  • d[n]*10^n + d[n-1]*10^(n-1) + ... + d[2]*10^2 + d[1]*10^1 + d[0]*10^0
  • Eg: 3045
    = 3*10^3 + 4*10^1 + 5*10^0
    = 3000 + 40 + 5
    = 3045

• Base 2 representation (binary) (0..1):
  • d[n]*2^n + d[n-1]*2^(n-1) + ... + d[2]*^2 + d[1]*2^1 + d[0]*2^0
  • Eg: 101101
    = 1*2^5 + 1*2^3 + 1*2^2 + 1*2^0
    = 32 + 8 + 4 + 1
    = 45

• Base 16 representation (hex) (0..9,A..F):
  • d[n]*16^n + d[n-1]*16^(n-1) + ... + d[2]*16^2 + d[1]*16^1 + d[0]*16^0
  • 3AF
    = 3*16^2 + 10*16^1 + 15*16^0
    = 3*256 + 10*16 + 15
    = 943

• Pop quiz: Question 1

Addition Operation

• Compute sum of digits, modulo base
• Propagate carries to next digit.

• Pop quiz 2

Base conversion

• Division/Remainder method: Long division by largest power of b.

• Example: Convert 45 to binary
  • 45 divides by 32 (2^5) once, leaves 13
  • 13 divides by 8 (2^3) once, leaves 5
  • 5 divides by 4 (2^2) once, leaves 1
  • 1 divides by 1 (2^0) once, leaves nothing [done]
  • Thus: 45 (base 10) == 101101 (base 2)

• Pop quiz 3

Signed and Unsigned Numbers

• We need a way to represent negative numbers

• Simple idea: Use the first bit as a sign bit!
  • s=0: positive (+)
  • s=1: negative (-)

  • Problem: There are TWO zeros 1...0 and 0...0
    • Difficult to process negative numbers (special case)
    • There is a better way to handle negative numbers!

• Solution: Use Two's complement
  • Numeric Formula:
    -d[n]*2^n + d[n-1]*2^(n-1) + ... + d[2]*2^2 + d[1]*2^1 + d[0]*2^0
    Notice the negative sign in front of d[n]

    

  • To subtract A-B, perform A+(-B).
    Now the addition operator works for negative numbers

  • Notice: First bit still represents the sign of the number.
    • s=0: positive (+)
    • s=1: negative (-)

  • Three methods to compute a negative number (n) (choose one method)
    1. Inverting bits then add 1
    2. Take largest number (all ones), subtract n, add 1
    3. Scan n from right to left. copy zeros, copy 1st one, invert rest

  • Examples (8-bit):
    • -1 = 1111,1111
    • -2 = 1111,1110
    • -128 = 1000,0000
    • +1 = 0000,0001
    • +127 = 0111,1111
    • +128 = Invalid

  • Examples: (16-bit)
    • -1 = 1111,1111,1111,1111
    • -2 = 1111,1111,1111,1110
    • -32,768 = 1000,0000,0000,0000

  • Observations
    • When you move to a larger register (number of bits), just extend the Nth bit to the left.
      

  • Pop quiz: Question 3

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