WIMP Help Top > What is WIMP?

What is WIMP?
WIMP is a processor simulator designed for educational purposes. "WIMP" stands for "WIMP Is More or less a Processor". It has absolutely nothing to do with the "Windows Icons Menus Pointing device" WIMP, or "Wind*ws Media Player". Though it is specifically aimed to meet the A-level computing requirements of AQA, this does not limit its use to only teaching A-level candidates and it should be useful for anyone with an interest in processor architecture and assembly language programming. WIMP itself was made as an A-level computing project.
The main focus of WIMP lies in the following:
- Teaching the workings of the "Fetch & Execute" cycle
- Teaching the functions of each of the modules and components which make up the processor
- Giving experience in assembly language programming
WIMP simulates a custom designed processor which, while being extremely simple, still complies with all the requirements set in AQA's Computing course. This simplified processor has the following features, some of which may not realistically exist but is useful for simplification purposes:
-All data is expressed in its assembly code representation inside buses and registers. This was preferred over using binary representations, purely because using binary will make the whole program unintuitive.
-The width of the registers and buses are defined to be "1 unit": this means that they are large enough to fit exactly one instruction statement (eg: "LOA A N 100") or a piece of data (eg: an integer or a character). This simplification was done because complexities such as instructions which take up more than one word of space are not covered in the A-level syllabus.
-The address and data bus is concatenated into a single address/data bus.
WIMP Help Top > What is WIMP?