Datapath and control

Objective

Implement hardware to execute simple instruction set

MIPS-lite

arithmetic/logical: add, sub, and, or, slt

memory access: lw, sw

branch/jump: beq, j

Concepts

Stored program

memory stores both program instructions and data

simplifying assumption: data and instruction memory separate

Instruction set architecture (ISA)

load-store architecture

operations can be performed only on data in registers

CPU

Datapath: performs operations on data (i.e., ALU)

Control: tells datapath,  memory, etc. what to do