The Essentials Of Computer Organization And Architecture 4th Edition by Linda Null,Julia Lobur

Exercise 62

The Population Studies Institute monitors the population of the United States. In 2008, this institute wrote a program to create files of the numbers representing populations of the various states, as well as the total population of the United States. This program, which runs on a Motorola processor, projects the population based on various rules, such as the average numbers of births and deaths per year. The institute runs the program and then ships the output files to state agencies so the data values can be used as input into various applications. However, one Pennsylvania agency, running all Intel machines, encountered difficulties, as indicated by the following problem. When the 32-bit unsigned integer (representing the overall U.S. population prediction for 2013) is used as input, and the agency's program simply outputs this input value, the U.S. population forecast for 2014 is far too large. Can you help this Pennsylvania agency by explaining what might be going wrong? (Hint: They are run on different processors.)