JNTU B.Tech III COMPUTER ORGANIZATION AND OPERATING SYSTEM Previous Question Paper (January/February - 2021 - R16)

The basic operational concepts of a computer system center on the Von Neumann architecture, which involves the interaction between the processor, memory, and input/output (I/O) units. The operation is defined by the Instruction Cycle:

1. Input Unit: Accepts data and instructions from external sources and converts them into binary format for processing.
2. Memory Unit: Stores programs and data. It is divided into primary memory (RAM) for active tasks and secondary storage for long-term retention.
3. Central Processing Unit (CPU): The brain of the system, comprising the Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) for calculations and logical operations, and the Control Unit (CU) which coordinates the flow of data and instruction execution.
4. Output Unit: Translates processed binary results back into human-readable form.

The system operates by fetching instructions from memory, decoding them in the CU, executing them in the ALU, and storing the results back in memory.

Floating-point representation follows the IEEE 754 standard, which expresses numbers in the form:

Consider representing the decimal number 8.5 in single-precision (32-bit) format:

1. Binary Conversion: 8.5 in binary is 1000.1.
2. Normalization: Shift the decimal to get 1.0001 × 2^3.
3. Sign Bit: Since the number is positive, S = 0.
4. Exponent: The exponent is 3. Adding the bias of 127 gives 130. In binary, 130 is 10000010.
5. Mantissa: The fractional part after the leading 1 is 0001. Padding with zeros to 23 bits gives 0001000...0.

The final 32-bit representation is: