Types of Operations

The number of different opcodes varies widely from machine to machine. However, the same general types of operations are found on all machines. A useful and typi­cal categorization is the following:

1) Data transfer

2) Arithmetic

3) Logical

4) Conversion

5) I/O

6) System control

7) Transfer of control

 

1)  Data transfer:

The most fundamental type of machine instruction is the data transfer instruction. The data transfer instruction must specify several things.

• The location of the source and destination operands must be specified. Each location could be memory. a register, or the lop of the stack.
• The length of data to be transferred must be indicated.
• As with all instructions with operands, the mode of addressing for each operand must be specified.

In term of CPU action, data transfer operations are perhaps the simplest type. If both source and destination are registers, then the CPU simply causes data to be transferred from one register to another; this is an operation internal to the CPU. If one or both operands are in memory, then (he CPU must perform some or all of following actions:

1. Calculate the memory address, based on the address mode

2. If the address refers to virtual memory, translate from virtual to actual mem­ory address.

3. Determine whether the addressed item is in cache.

4. If not, issue a command lo the memory module.

Example:

Operation mnemonic	Name	Number of bits transferred	Description
L	Load	32	Transfer from memory in register
LH	Store half-word	16	Transler from memory to register
ST	store	32	Transfer from register to memory
STH	Store half-word	16	Transfer from register to memory

 

 

2) Arithmetic:

Most machines provide the basic arithmetic operations of add, subtract, multiply, and divide. These are invariably provided for signed integer (fixed-point) numbers, Often they are also provided for floating-point and packed decimal numbers.

Other possible operations include a variety of single-operand instructions: for example.

• Absolute: Take the absolute value of the operand.

• Negate: Negate the Operand.

• Increment.: Add 1 to the operand.

• Decrement: Subtract 1 from the operand.

3) Logical:

Most machines also provide a variety of operations for manipulating individual bits of a word or other addressable units, often referred to as "bit twiddling." They are based upon Boolean operations.

Some of the basic logical operations that can be performed on Boolean or binary data are AND, OR, NOT, XOR, …

These logical operations can be applied bitwise to n-bit logical data units. Thus, if two registers contain the data

(R1) - 10100101 (R2) - 00001111

then

(R1) AND (R2) – 00000101

In addition lo bitwise logical operations, most machines provide a variety of shifting and rotating functions such as shift left, shift right, right rotate, left rotate.....

4) Conversion:

Conversion instructions are those that change the format or operate on the format of data. An example is converting from decimal to binary.

5) Input/Output:

As we saw, there are a variety of approaches taken, including isolated programmed IO, memory-mapped programmed I/O, DMA, and the use of an I/O processor. Many implementations provide only a few I/O instructions, with the specific actions spec­ified by parameters, codes, or command words.

6) System Controls:

System control instructions are those that can he executed only while the proces­sor is in a certain privileged state or is executing a program in a special privileged area of memory, typically, these instructions are reserved for the use of the oper­ating system. Some examples of system control operations are as follows. A system control instruction may read or alter a control register. Another example is an instruction to read or modify a storage protection key, such us is used in the S/390 memory system. Another example is access to process control blocks in a multiprogramming system.

7) Transfer of control:

For all of the operation types discussed so far. The next instruction to be performed is the one that immediately follows, in memory, the current instruction. However, a significant fraction of the instructions in any program have as their function chang­ing the sequence of instruction execution. For these instructions, the operation per­formed by the CPU is to update the program counter to contain the address of some instruction in memory.

There are a number of reasons why transfer-of-control operations are re­quired. Among the most important are the following:

1. In the practical use of computers, it is essential to be able to execute each instruction more than once and perhaps many thousands of times. It may require thousands or perhaps millions of instructions to implement an appli­cation. This would be unthinkable if each instruction had to be written out sep­arately. If a table or a list of items is to be processed, a program loop is needed. One sequence of instructions is executed repeatedly to process all the data.

2. Virtually all programs involve some decision making. We would like the com­puter to do one thing if one condition holds, and another thing if another con­dition holds. For example, a sequence of instructions computes the square root of a number. At the start of the sequence, the sign of the number is tested, If the number is negative, the computation is not performed, but an error con­dition is reported.

3. To compose correctly a large or even medium-size computer program is an exceedingly difficult task. It helps if there are mechanisms for breaking the task up into smaller pieces that can be worked on one at a time.