1. How many states are possible for a 10-bit value? 2. What problem were the “bi
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Question
1. How many states are possible for a 10-bit value?
2. What problem were the “binary prefixes” introduced to solve?
3. How many possible 1-parameter bitwise operators are there with
A) 1 parameter? (unary operators)
B) 2 parameters? (binary operators)
C) 3 parameters? (trinary operators)
4. Which logical operation is used for masking bits to extract a field?
5. What SPARC instructions are intended to facilitate using bits as flags?
6. How do the results of the srl instruction differ from the sra instruction?
7. Why aren’t BCDs used for general-purpose computing?
8. What is a positional number system?
9. Why are bases 8 and 16 commonly used?
10. What is a word with more than 4 letters that can also be read as a hexadecimal number?
11. Which general base-conversion algorithm is better when A) Working in the destination base B) Working in the source base
12. How is UTF-8 related to ASCII?
Explanation / Answer
1. How many states are possible for a 10-bit value?
Every integer has an equivalent representation in decimal and binary. Except for 0 and 1, the binary representation of an integer has more digits than its decimal counterpart. To find the number of binary digits (bits) corresponding to any given decimal integer, you could convert the decimal number to binary and count the bits. For example, the two-digit decimal integer 29 converts to the five-digit binary integer 11101. But there’s a way to compute the number of bits directly, without the conversion.
Sometimes you want to know, not how many bits are required for a specific integer, but how many are required for a d-digit integer — a range of integers. A range of integers has a range of bit counts. For example, four-digit decimal integers require between 10 and 14 bits. For any d-digit range, you might want to know its minimum, maximum, or average number of bits. Those values can be computed directly as well.
2. What problem were the “binary prefixes” introduced to solve?
A binary prefix is a prefix attached before a unit symbol to multiply it by a power of 2. In computing, such a prefix is seen in combination with a unit of information (bit, byte, etc.), to indicate a power of 1024.
The computer industry has historically used the units kilobyte, megabyte, and gigabyte, and the corresponding symbols KB, MB, and GB, in at least two slightly different measurement systems. In citations of main memory (RAM) capacity, gigabyte customarily means 1073741824 bytes. As this is the third power of 1024, and 1024 is a power of two (210), this usage is referred to as a binary prefix.
In most other contexts, the industry uses the multipliers kilo, mega, giga, etc., in a manner consistent with their meaning in the International System of Units (SI), namely as powers of 1000. For example, a 500 gigabyte hard disk holds 500000000000 bytes, and a 100-megabit-per-second Ethernet connection transfers data at 100000000 bit/s. In contrast with the binary prefix usage, this use is described as a decimal prefix, as 1000 is a power of 10 (103).
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