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When reading from memory, data addressed by MAR is fed into the MDR (memory data register) and then used by the CPU. When writing to memory, the CPU writes data from MDR to the memory location whose address is stored in MAR. MAR, which is found inside the CPU, goes either to the RAM (random-access memory) or cache.
Memory-mapped I/O is preferred in IA-32 and x86-64 based architectures because the instructions that perform port-based I/O are limited to one register: EAX, AX, and AL are the only registers that data can be moved into or out of, and either a byte-sized immediate value in the instruction or a value in register DX determines which port is the source or destination port of the transfer.
To address a PCI device, it must be enabled by being mapped into the system's I/O port address space or memory-mapped address space. The system's firmware (e.g. BIOS) or the operating system program the Base Address Registers (commonly called BARs) to inform the device of its resources configuration by writing configuration commands to the PCI ...
In contrast, in direct memory access (DMA) operations, the CPU is uninvolved in the data transfer. The term can refer to either memory-mapped I/O (MMIO) or port-mapped I/O (PMIO). PMIO refers to transfers using a special address space outside of normal memory, usually accessed with dedicated instructions, such as IN and OUT in x86 architectures.
Decoding the op-code in the instruction register includes determining the instruction, determining where its operands are in memory, retrieving the operands from memory, allocating processor resources to execute the command (in super scalar processors), etc.
A link register (LR for short) is a register which holds the address to return to when a subroutine call completes. This is more efficient than the more traditional scheme of storing return addresses on a call stack, sometimes called a machine stack. The link register does not require the writes and reads of the memory containing the stack ...
The program counter (PC), [1] commonly called the instruction pointer (IP) in Intel x86 and Itanium microprocessors, and sometimes called the instruction address register (IAR), [2] [1] the instruction counter, [3] or just part of the instruction sequencer, [4] is a processor register that indicates where a computer is in its program sequence.
# This gives the memory system two clock ticks to fetch the next # instruction to the memory data register for use by the instruction decode. # The sequencer instruction "next" means just add 1 to the control word address. MDR, NONE, MAR, COPY, NEXT, NONE # This places the address of the next instruction into the PC. # This gives the memory ...