April 2003
Intermediate to advanced
576 pages
15h 13m
English
Nearly all microcomputers share the same overall structure, consisting of three essential components that are visible to the assembly language programmer:
the central processing unit (the CPU), which contains local storage registers, a data manipulation unit that performs arithmetic and logic operations, and essential control circuitry;
the high-speed primary memory, which holds both instructions and data; and
the peripheral input and output devices (the I/O system), which enable interaction with humans or with other devices.
These components must be interconnected in some fashion, as indicated schematically in Figure 2-1. In a typical implementation of any architecture, the interconnections take the form of a bus, or several ...