If an architecture has a move instruction with more than one word and at most one of the two operands may be an indirect memory reference, the minimum number of frames needed to run a process on this architecture is
A) 3
B) 4
C) 5
D) 6

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

In this architecture, we need 3 frames for the instruction to be executed:
1. Instruction Fetch
2. Operand Fetch (if one of the operands is a memory reference)
3. Execute

If we consider the process, we need two additional frames:
4. Memory Access (if an indirect memory reference is used)
5. Write back

Therefore, a minimum of 5 frames are needed to run a process on this architecture.

If an Architecture Has a Move Instruction with More Than