Computer Architecture and

Assembly Language
Chapter 1: Introduction to Microprocessor
and Assembly Language Programming
Iqra Abdul Ghaffar
Dept. of Computer Science & IT
The Islamia university of Bahawalpur, RYK Campus
 Outline
 Inside the Microprocessor
 Introduction to Assembly Language Programming
 Introduction to Program Segments

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 Inside the CPU

There are two ways to make CPU process information faster:

 Increase the working frequency.
 Using technology available with cost considerations.
 Change the internal architecture of CPU.

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 Inside the CPU / Pipelining

The idea of pipelining in its simplest form is to allow the CPU

to fetch and execute at same time.

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 Inside the CPU / Registers
 In the CPU, registers store information temporarily.
 One or two bytes of data to be processed.
 The address of data.
 General purpose registers in CPU can be accessed as either 16-
bit or 8-bit registers.
 All other registers can be accessed as 16bits only.
 To access 12-bit data, for example a 16-bit register must be
used with highest 4 bits set to 0.

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 Inside the CPU / Registers
 The bits of registers are numbered in descending order, as
shown:

 The first letter of each register indicates its use.

 AX  Accumulator
 BX  Base register
 CX  Counter
 DX  Points to data in I/O operations
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 Inside the CPU / Registers

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 Introduction to Assembly Programming

 CPU can work only in binary, very high speeds.

 Tedious and slow for humans to deal with binary.
 A program of 0s and 1s is called machine language.
 Early computer programmers actually coded programs in
machine language.
 Eventually, Assembly languages were developed which provides
mnemonics for machine code.
 Mnemonics  Abbreviations

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 Introduction to Assembly Programming

 Assembly language is referred to as a low-level language

because it deals directly with internal structure of the CPU.
 Assembly language programs must be translated into machine
code by a program called an assembler.
 To program in assembly language, programmers must know
number of registers and their size.

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 Introduction to Assembly Programming

 There are numerous assemblers available for translating

Assembly language programs into machine code.
 MASM by Microsoft
 An assembly language program consists of a mnemonic,
optionally forwarded by one or two operands.
 Operands are the data items being manipulated.
 Mnemonics are commands to the CU, telling it what to do with
those items.
 Two widely used instructions are move and add.

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 Introduction to Assembly Programming

 The MOV instruction copies data from one location to another

using format:
MOV destination, source ; copy source operand to destination
 Move  Copies source operand to destination
 E-g: MOV DX, CX  copies content of CX to DX

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 Introduction to Assembly Programming
MOV Instruction

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 Introduction to Assembly Programming
MOV Instruction
• In CPU, data can be moved among all the registers as long as
source and destination registers match in size (except flag
register)

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 Introduction to Assembly Programming
MOV Instruction

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 Introduction to Assembly Programming
MOV Instruction

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 Introduction to Assembly Programming
MOV Instruction

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 Introduction to Assembly Programming
ADD Instruction

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 Introduction to Assembly Programming
ADD Instruction

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 Introduction to Assembly Programming
ADD Instruction

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 Introduction to Assembly Programming
ADD Instruction

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 Introduction to Assembly Programming
ADD Instruction

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 Introduction to Assembly Programming
Review Questions

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 Introduction to Program Segments
A typical Assembly language program consists of at least three
segments:
A Code segment: which contains the assembly language instructions
that the program was designed to accomplish.
A Data segment: used to store information (data) to be processed by
the instructions in the code segment.
A Stack segment: used by the CPU to store information temporarily.

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 Introduction to Program Segments Logical
address and physical address
 The Physical Address: The 20-bit address actually on the
address pins of the 8086 processor decoded by the memory
interfacing circuitry.
 This address can have a range of 00000H to FFFFFH.
 An actual physical location in RAM or ROM within the 1MB memory
range.
 The offset address: A location in a 64K-byte segment range
which can range from 0000H to FFFFH.
 The logical address: which consist of a segment value and an
offset address.

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 Introduction to Code Segment

 To execute a program, CPU fetches the instructions (opcodes

and operands) from the code segment.
 The logical address of an instruction always consist of a CS
(Code segment) and an IP (Instruction Pointer) shown as: CS:IP
 The physical address for the location of the instruction is
generated by shifting the CS left one hex digit then adding it
to the IP (offset address)
 The resulting 20 bit address is called physical address since it
is put on the external physical address bus pins.

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 Introduction to Code Segment

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 Introduction to Code Segment

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 Introduction to Code Segment

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 Introduction to Code Segment

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 Introduction to Code Segment

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 Introduction to Logical / Physical Address

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 Introduction to Logical / Physical Address

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 Introduction to Logical / Physical Address

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 Introduction to Data Segment

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 Introduction to Data Segment

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 Introduction to Data Segment

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 Introduction to Data Segment

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 Introduction to Data Segment

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 Introduction to Data Segment Logical/Physical
Address

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 Introduction to Data Segment Logical/Physical
Address

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 Introduction to Data Segment Logical/Physical
Address

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 Introduction to Program Segments Little endian method

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 Introduction to Program Segments Big endian
method

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 Introduction to Program Segments
Extra Segment

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 Thank You

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