I'm studying Microprocessors and interfacing at uni and I've come across a very difficult question to get my head around.
"Can you design an 8-bit instruction format that cal allow 4 2-operand instructions for a machine with 8 registers"
I'm not 100% sure what it's asking, a point in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.
Note: The course is based around learning assembler on an AVR board (if it helps).
It's basically asking whether you can encode any of four different instructions, each with two register operands, into 8 bits (per instruction).
The answer would be yes. Simply count the number of possible operations: 4 instructions * 8 possible first registers * 8 possible second registers = 256; you can represent 256 possible values with 8 bits, so it must be possible to encode each of the 256 possible operations as a single 8-bit value.