Introduction to Computer Organization

16 Computing with Bitwise Logic, Multiplication, and Division Instructions

Now that we’ve learned about program organization, let’s turn our attention to computation. We’ll start by looking at the logic operators, which can be used to change individual bits in a value by using a technique called masking. Then we’ll move on to shift operations, which provide a way to multiply or divide by powers of two. In the last two sections of this chapter, we’ll cover arithmetic multiplication and division by arbitrary integers.

Bit Masking

It’s often better to think of data items as patterns of bits rather than numerical entities. For example, if you ...