Microprocessor Interview Questions and Answers - Part 2

Microprocessor Interview Questions and Answers

What’s the speed and device maximum specs for Firewire?
IEEE 1394 (Firewire) supports the maximum of 63 connected devices with speeds up to 400 Mbps. Where’s MBR located on the disk? Main Boot Record is located in sector 0, track 0, head 0, cylinder 0 of the primary active partition.

Where does CPU Enhanced mode originate from?
Intel’s 80386 was the first 32-bit processor, and since the company had to backward-support the 8086. All the modern Intel-based processors run in the Enhanced mode, capable of switching between Real mode (just like the real 8086) and Protected mode, which is the current mode of operation.

How many bit combinations are there in a byte?
Byte contains 8 combinations of bits.

Have you studied buses? What types?
There are three types of buses.
Address bus: This is used to carry the Address to the memory to fetch either Instruction or Data.
Data bus : This is used to carry the Data from the memory.
Control bus : This is used to carry the Control signals like RD/WR, Select etc.

What is the Maximum clock frequency in 8086?
5 Mhz is the Maximum clock frequency in 8086.

What is meant by Maskable interrupts?
An interrupt that can be turned off by the programmer is known as Maskable interrupt.

What is Non-Maskable interrupts?
An interrupt which can be never be turned off (ie. disabled) is known as Non-Maskable interrupt

What are the different functional units in 8086?
Bus Interface Unit and Execution unit, are the two different functional units in 8086.

What are the various segment registers in 8086?
Code, Data, Stack, Extra Segment registers in 8086.

What does EU do?
Execution Unit receives program instruction codes and data from BIU, executes these instructions and store the result in general registers.

Which Stack is used in 8086? k is used in 8086?
FIFO (First In First Out) stack is used in 8086.In this type of Stack the first stored information is retrieved first.

What are the flags in 8086?
In 8086 Carry flag, Parity flag, Auxiliary carry flag, Zero flag, Overflow flag, Trace flag, Interrupt flag, Direction flag, and Sign flag.

What is SIM and RIM instructions?
SIM is Set Interrupt Mask. Used to mask the hardware interrupts.
RIM is Read Interrupt Mask. Used to check whether the interrupt is Masked or not.