Chapter 5, Problem 25RETC

Explanation of Solution

Instruction set architectures (ISA) is categorized on the basis of the decision, how CPU is making decisions on storing the data. The data should be stored somewhere to make data available for processing, after the byte ordering of memory is determined. There are three architectures:

• Stack based architecture
• Accumulator architecture
• General-purpose register (GPR) architecture

Stack architecture:

In this type of architecture, stack is used to store the data or operands so as to execute the instructions. The operands are stored on the top of the stack. Even though the architecture is easy to evaluate and process good density code, it is not possible to randomly pick or choose the operand value from stack. This feature makes this architecture not so efficient one in generating code.

Example:

Fourth virtual machine is an example for this architecture which is a stack based virtual machine...