Assembly
Computer Organization and Assembly Languages, Fall 2005
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History of Intel CPUs*

1978 8086 16-bit processor, up to 1MB RAM, available in 5,6,8 and 10 MHz, 29K transistors.
1979 8088 chosen for the first IBM PC.
1982 80286 up to 16MB RAM, up to 20 MHz, 134K transistors, virtual memory and protected mode.
1985 80386 32-bit processor, up to 4GB RAM, up to 33 MHz, 275K transistors, instruction pipelining.
1989 80486 1.2M transistors, integrated FPU, 8KB on-chip cache.
1993 Pentium up to 200MHz, two 8K caches.
1995 Pentium Pro RISC chip, more stages in pipeline, on-board L2 cache.
1997 Pentium II MMX instruction, dynamic execution, up to 450MHz.
1999 Pentium III SSE instruction, up to 1+GHz.
2000 Pentium IV Hyper pipeline, Rapid execution engine, Execution trace cache, 3.8+GHz.
2005 Pentium D Dual core.
* adapted from A CPU History.

Course overview

This course is about computer organization and assembly languages, specifically for Intel architectures. You might wonder why learning assembly languages. After all, who will write assembly programs these days. Actually, people still write assembly for faster codes (compiler is not as smart as men yet), smaller codes (for devices with limited amount of memory such as mobile devices) and specific architectures (in which there are not even compilers, for example, early GPUs). With these in mind, other than the fundamentals about assembly programming, this course emphasizes on code optimization techniques on writing fast and small codes for specific architectures, here, Intel architectures.

Meeting time: 9:10am-12:10pm every Thursday
Classroom: CSIE Room 103
Instructor: Yung-Yu Chuang
Teaching assistants: Shih-Hsuan Hsu , Shan-Yung Yang
Office hours: 13:20-14:10 Monday Room 539
Mailing list: Subscribe via this website.
Textbook:
Assembly Language for Intel-Based Computers, 4th Edition, Kip R. Irvine.


Reference:

Grading: (subjct to change)
  • 4 assignments (50%)
  • class participation (5%)
  • midterm exam (20%)
  • final project (25%)

Syllabus (topics we might cover):
  • IA-32 Processor Architecture
  • Assembly Language Fundamentals
  • Data Transfers, Addressing,and Arithmetic
  • Procedures
  • Conditional Processing
  • Integer Arithmetic
  • Advanced Procedures
  • Strings and Arrays
  • Structures and Macros
  • High-Level Language Interface
  • SIMD
  • Real Arithmetic
  • Code Optimization
  • BIOS Level Programming