JAWAHARLAL NEHRU TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY HYDERABAD B.Tech II Year COMPUTER ORGANIZATION AND MICROPROCESSOR Previous Question Paper (August/September - 2022 - R18)

Computer architecture refers to the conceptual design and fundamental operational structure of a computer system, focusing on the attributes visible to a programmer, such as instruction sets, addressing modes, and data types. In contrast, computer organization refers to the operational units and their interconnections that realize the architectural specifications, focusing on hardware details like control signals, memory technology, and physical interfaces.

Registers are high-speed storage locations within the CPU used to hold data, instructions, and addresses during processing. The most important registers include:

• Program Counter (PC): Holds the memory address of the next instruction to be fetched for execution.
• Instruction Register (IR): Stores the instruction currently being decoded and executed by the control unit.
• Memory Address Register (MAR): Holds the address of the memory location from which data is to be read or to which data is to be written.
• Memory Data Register (MDR): Acts as a buffer to hold data being transferred between the CPU and memory.
• Accumulator (AC): A general-purpose register used to store the intermediate results of arithmetic and logical operations performed by the ALU.
• Stack Pointer (SP): Points to the top of the current stack in memory, essential for handling subroutines and interrupts.
• Status Register (Flags): Contains bits that indicate the current state of the processor, such as zero, carry, overflow, and negative flags resulting from an operation.