Professional Documents
Culture Documents
3.3 Example Questions: Notes: Part (A) Is Often Poorly Understood by Students. The Majority Believing
3.3 Example Questions: Notes: Part (A) Is Often Poorly Understood by Students. The Majority Believing
3.3 Example Questions: Notes: Part (A) Is Often Poorly Understood by Students. The Majority Believing
3 Example Questions
The questions in this section are meant to mirror the type and form of questions
that a candidate would expect to see in an exam paper. As before, the individual
questions are each followed up with comments from an examiner.
b) Describe two ways in which the program counter can change during the normal
execution of a program, explaining, in each case, how this change is initiated.
(4)
c) Describe the initial state of the program counter before the running of the
program. (2)
b) -P.C. is incremented…
-as part of the fetch execute cycle.
-P.C. is altered to the value being held in the address part of the instruction…
-When the instruction is one that alters the normal sequence of instructions in the
program.
-This second type of command involves the P.C. being reset twice in the same
cycle. (4)
c) -The P.C. will contain the address of the first instruction in the sequence to be
run…
-this must have been placed in the register by some external agent, the program
loader. (2)
Notes: Part (a) is often poorly understood by students. The majority believing
that the program counter is used to keep track of the number of programs running,
or the order in which programs have been called. There is obviously confusion
with the idea of a stack storing return addresses of modules when they have been
called.
Notes: Many students will be content with the correct answer that VN
architecture is the ability to store the instructions and data in the same memory.
However, a look at the mark allocation shows that something else is required or
only one mark would have been available. Always look at the mark allocation
and think of the examiner, is there enough in the answer given to be able to award
the full number of marks?
Notes: The whole cycle may be asked for in some questions but it is more likely
that it would be split up in some way in order to make the question shorter and
more accessible. This is a difficult question because there is no splitting up of the
points asked for, the student must rely on their own interpretation of the
requirements of the question. There is a hint in the question because it asks for
two parts of the cycle specifically, but students should be aware that that becomes
a part of the question, in other words the answer must not contain any further
information because it has been specifically ruled out in the question. A
candidate who describes the execution of particular types of instruction has
demonstrated that they cannot differentiate between the parts of the cycle and
would probably be penalised.
b) State one type of instruction that would cause the pipeline system to be reset,
explaining why such a reset is necessary. (3)
b) -Jump instruction
-The instructions in the pipeline are no longer the ones to be dealt with next…
-so the pipeline has to be reset. (3)
Back