Simplified Instructional Computer

The Simplified Instructional Computer is a hypothetical computer described in Leland Beck's book System Software. Most real microprocessors have a complex instruction set and many subtleties to increase efficiency. These can be a distraction for students that are studying the essential and universal aspects of a microprocessor that are common to different designs. The architecture uses 3 byte integers, 5 registers and can access 2^{15=32768 bytes of memory.}

The five registers are as follows:

* A register (accumulator): This is the one-byte register that stores the address of the variable.
* X register (index): The index register can operate in two modes, direct and indexed.
* SW register (status word)
* PC register (program counter)
* L register (linkage): This register is used for subroutine jumps.

Negative values are stored in 1's complement format. The SIC has two versions: a standard version, SIC, and an extended version, SIC/XE. The extended version has floating point numbers.

See also

* MIX