Programmed Introduction to MIPS Assembly Language

http://programmedlessons.org/AssemblyTutorial/index.html

by jfe • 12 years ago

32 9 12 years ago

hvs• 12 years ago

I remember doing MIPS assembler in the computer hardware class in college. We used the book "Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface" (aka "Patterson and Hennessy") [1]. At the time it was an enlightening experience because until then I hadn't fully internalized how computers were implemented at the hardware level.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Organization-Design-Fifth-Arc...

rayiner• 12 years ago

If you don't have a MIPS machine on hand, try SPIM: http://users.ece.gatech.edu/~sudha/academic/class/ece2030/Le....

rasz_pl• 12 years ago

or any Playstation 1 emulator

infogulch• 12 years ago

We used MARS[1] for assembly class a couple years ago.

[1]: MIPS Assembler and Runtime Simulator (MARS) http://courses.missouristate.edu/KenVollmar/MARS/

iso8859-1• 12 years ago

It's interesting cause it allows you to step back and see previous machine states. Not many VM's can do this. Probably only works cause there is no OS which would clutter the set of relevant states.

zackmorris• 12 years ago

I also used that book in college, it’s still sitting on my shelf. It had some really fantastic discussion of things like wait states (NOP's after branches or whatnot ) that fundamentally can't be worked around because the propagation delay of the logic gates for one operation take longer than the delay of another operation. It also talked about the dangers of long pipelines. I feel sometimes that most of the "progress" since I graduated in 1999 has been to work around these bottlenecks with things like branch prediction and excessive caching, but the cost of that has been to largely ignore more lucrative opportunities in multiprocessing.

We probably should have moved to processors with distributed CPUs/ram so that computations could be done in-place with languages like Erlang, Go and MATLAB. We should have ditched GPUs for general purpose DSPs also. Computers today really aren’t much use to me because I want to experiment with parallel code like neural nets and genetic algorithms but my hands are tied (OpenCL/CUDA focus on the wrong abstraction level). To effectively do that, I’d have to design a parallel processor with an FPGA first, say 256 MIPS cores with 4 MB of ram each at 1 GHz. As little hardware as possible would be wasted on cache and interconnect, instead, cores would just have pipes to their neighbors and software would handle replication.

Does anyone know of an open source emulator/virtual machine for a processor like this that runs on ordinary slow hardware and high latency networks? I visualize it as each core having its private memory space and the ability to open 4 sockets to its neighbors (someday 6 with 3D chips), with the global shared persistent storage showing up as a slow mount and acting as a software transactional memory for resetting and synchronizing the cores. Spinning up another instance of the VM would connect another N cores.

fenollp• 12 years ago

https://www.parallella.org/

RISC, but has the things you mentioned.

zumtar• 12 years ago

Another fantastic MIPS resource is a book by David and Sarah Harris' book "Digital Design and Computer Architecture".

It is a great book that covers digital logic, computer architecture, HDL design (both Verilog and VHDL) and the MIPS architecture.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Digital-Design-Computer-Architecture...

bntyhntr• 12 years ago

"Works best with IE 6.0 or higher, at 1024 x 768 resolution or better"

Does IE6 not load the background?

Programmed Introduction to MIPS Assembly Language

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