CS301 – Fall 2002

Prof. Hartman

Announcements:

12/6/02 Homework #10 is due Friday, December 13^th by 5:00 pm.

12/2/02 Homework #9 is due Friday, December 6^th by 5:00 pm. Also, please test the following code on various architectures so we can see the average number of clock cycles taken: loops.c timing.asm

11/20/02 NOTE: Homework #8 due date changed! Due just before Thanksgiving.

11/18/02 Homework #8 is due Wednesday, November 27^th by 5:00 pm.

11/1/02 Homework #7 is due Friday, November 8^th by 5:00 pm.

10/25/02 Homework #6 is due Friday, November 1^st by 5:00 pm.

10/18/02 Homework #5 is due Friday, October 25^th by 5:00 pm.

9/27/02 Homework #4 is due Friday, October 6^th by 5:00 pm.

9/20/02 Homework #3 is due Friday, September 27^th by 5:00 pm.

9/13/02 Homework #2 is due Friday, September 20^th by 5:00 pm. Here is the step by step process to using NASM under Windows.

9/9/02 Homework #1 is due Friday, September 13^th by 5:00 pm.

9/6/02 Homework #0 is due Monday, September 9^th by 5:00 pm.

Links:

Paul Carter’s PC Assembly Language – the (online) text we are using for this class.
NASM – the assembler we will be using in this class
A local copy of the NASM documentation in PDF or HTML.
Assembly language style guidelines – A good set of rules to follow to make your programs readable.
A whole page of Pentium architecture links.
The Intel Pentium Architecture documentation
The Intel Itanium Architecture documentation
Randall Hyde’s Assembly Language Page – The author of an online text about Assembly Language Programming, Randall Hyde has links here to his book along with a ton of other useful 80x86 assembly information.
X86 assemblers – a page full of links about assemblers and assembly language programming.
A tutorial about DEBUG and 80x86 assembly language.
Brian Howard’s Assembly Language Tutorial – A useful beginners reference.
Adding NASM as a tool in Visual C++ 6.0
Developing Optimized Code with Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0
Last years CS301 web page

Lecture slides – if you don’t have PowerPoint you can download a free viewer from Microsoft.

If you must, use the HTML versions below, but the conversion isn’t perfect, so using the original format is better.

9/9/02 – Number Systems (HTML)
9/9/02 – Computer Organization (HTML)
9/11/02 – Assembly Language and NASM (HTML)
9/16/02 – Overview of Assembly Instructions (HTML)
9/20/02 – Control Structures (HTML)
9/23/02 – Boolean Operations (HTML)
9/25/02 – Subprograms (HTML)
9/30/02 – Arrays (HTML)
10/2/02 – String Instructions (HTML)
10/18/02 - Floating point (HTML)
10/25/02 – More about floating point (control word, status word, etc.) from Randall Hyde’s Art of Assembly (Win32 version) Chapter 11
10/28/02 – C++ and assembly (HTML)
10/30/02 – MMX instructions (HTML)
11/1/02 – SSE instructions are covered nicely on the web pages at Dr. Dobbs Journal and at Tommesani.com (where they make the Quexal tool for writing C/C++ code that uses MMX and SSE)
11/1/02 – We may get to discussion of cache and memory today. There is a great article at arstechnica titled Understanding CPU Caching and Performance
11/4/02 – A little more on memory systems and why we do things like doubleword alignment. The following sections are from Randall Hyde’s online book Art of Assembly (windows version).

Section 1.2.2 discusses memory alignment.
Section 1.4 discusses system timing and wait states.
Sections 4.7 and on discuss pre-fetching and pipelining.

11/18/02 – We discussed test answers, and started encoding instructions by hand.
11/22/02 – Timing and optimizing.
11/25/02 – Loop unrolling, other optimizations.
12/2/02 – Overview of Pentium IV and Itanium architectures. Mostly from links available on the Pentium Architecture Links page.
12/6/02 – The Pentium FDIV bug is pictured here and explained well here. Hyper-threading is explained well in Dell’s article An Introduction to Hyper-Threading Technology and more is available at Intel’s Hyper-Threading Technology.

Sample files: (Sometimes the links from the PowerPoint slides don’t work correctly)

Handouts

9/6/02 Handout 1 – Syllabus
9/6/02 Handout 2 – Homework #0
11/20/02 Handout 3 – Encoding Instructions (Microsoft Word format)