Things to review for Test 2

• All about floating point numbers: conversions from binary, decimal, and fractional form, IEEE floating point format, floating point coprocessor commands, etc. Basically, study all of Week 6.ppt.
• Architecture — You should be able to answer short questions about any of the following.
• How memory and cache work (data alignment)
• What wait states are (and what causes them)
• What pipelining is (Why are long pipelines good? Why are they bad?)
• Harvard and Von Neumann architecture
• Branch Prediction — what it is and why we do it.
• Pipeline stalls — bus contention, data hazards.
• Micro-instructions, out of order execution