WGU C952 – Instructions Exam with Complete Solutions

Instruction Set - ANSWER-The vocabulary of commands understood by a given architecture. Stored-program Concept - ANSWER-The idea that instructions and data of many types can be stored in memory as numbers and thus be easy to change, leading to the stored-program concept. Word - ANSWER-A natural unit of access in a computer, usually a group of 32 bits. Doubleword - ANSWER-Another natural unit of access in a computer, usually a group of 64 bits; corresponds to the size of a register in the LEGv8 architecture. Data Transfer Function - ANSWER-A command that moves data between memory and registers. Address - ANSWER-A value used to delineate the location of a specific data element within a memory array. Alignment Restriction - ANSWER-A requirement that data be aligned in memory on natural boundaries. Binary Digit (Binary Bit) - ANSWER-One of the two numbers in base 2, 0 or 1, that are components of information. Least Significant Bit (LSB) - ANSWER-The rightmost bit. Most Significant Bit (MSB) - ANSWER-The leftmost bit. Two's Complement - ANSWER-A signed number representation where a leading 0 indicates a positive number and a leading 1 indicates a negative number. The complement of a value is obtained by complementing each bit (0 to 1, 1 to 0) and then adding one to the result. One's Complement - ANSWER-A notation that represents the most negative value by 100....000 (base 2) and the most positive value with 01...111 (base 2) leaving an equal number of negatives and positives but ending up with two zeroes, one positive (00...00) and one negative (11...11). The term is also used to mean the inversion of every bit in a pattern. Biased Notation - ANSWER-A notation that represents the most negative value by 00...000 and the most positive value by 11...111 with zero typically having the value 10...00, thereby biasing the number such that the number plus the bias has a non-negative representation.