Fundamentals

The MIPS architecture is modern and well-designed. The MIPS chip was designed from the ground up in 1985. Its design includes the best ideas of computer architecture. It may surprise you that something done in 1985 could be called "modern". However, the fundamentals of any science change slowly, if at all. The MIPS is an excellent chip to study if you want to learn the fundamentals of how computers work.

An assembly language program describes exactly what the hardware should do, step by step, in terms of the basic operations of the hardware. In a high level programming language like C or Java a programmer is mostly unaware of computer architecture. The same source program can run (after compiling) on any processor family.

These notes are about fundamental assembly-level computer architecture. To do this effectively it is necessary to actually learn the assembly language and details of a particular processor, and to write programs for it. This is somewhat like those experiments you did in high school chemistry. Their goal was to teach you the fundamentals of chemistry, not to teach you how to make test tubes full of colorful water. But without the colorful experiments your understanding of chemistry might remain abstract and vague, and would soon be forgotten.