UNIT 1

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Briefly explain the growth in Technology with respect to the processor performance. Brief about the three classes and their characteristics. What are ISA? Brief about the MIPS ISA. Compare MIPS and 80x86 Instruction Set Architecture. What are MIPS? Explain MIPS64 Instruction Set Architecture formats. Explain the different trends in technologies. What are the trends to measure the performance (Bandwidth over Latency)? How do you scale the performance of the transistor and wires? (a). Explain the trends in Power in Integrated Circuits. (b). Some microprocessors today are designed to have adjustable voltage, so that a 15% reduction in voltage may result in a 15% reduction in frequency. What would be the impact on dynamic power? 10. Explain the different factors which affect the trends in cost. 11. What is the cost of an Integrated Circuit? 12. (a) Find the number of dies per 300 mm (30 cm) wafer for a die that is 1.5 cm on a side. (b) Find the die yield for dies that are 1.5 cm on a side and 1.0 cm on a side, assuming a defect density of 0.4 per cm2and is 4. 13. (a) What are the different measures of dependability? (b) Assume a disk subsystem with the following components and MTTF: _ 10 disks, each rated at 1,000,000-hour MTTF _ 1 SCSI controller, 500,000-hour MTTF _ 1 power supply, 200,000-hour MTTF _ 1 fan, 200,000-hour MTTF _ 1 SCSI cable, 1,000,000-hour MTTF Using the simplifying assumptions that the lifetimes are exponentially distributed and those failures are independent, compute the MTTF of the system as a whole. (c) Disk subsystems often have redundant power supplies to improve dependability. Using the components and MTTFs from above, calculate the reliability of a redundant power supply. Assume one power supply is sufficient to run the disk subsystem and that we are adding one redundant power supply. 14. What are the different benchmarks for Desktop and Servers. 15. What is SPECRatio? Show that the ratio of the geometric means is equal to the geometric mean of the performance ratios, and that the reference computer of SPECRatio matters not. 16. (a) Define and explain Amdahls Law. (b). Suppose that we want to enhance the processor used for Web serving. The new processor is 10 times faster on computation in the Web serving application than the original processor. Assuming that the original processor is busy with computation 40% of the time and is waiting for I/O 60% of the time, what is the overall speedup gained by incorporating the enhancement? 17. (a). Give the equation for the performance of processor

(b). Suppose we have made the following measurements: Frequency of FP operations = 25% Average CPI of FP operations = 4.0 Average CPI of other instructions = 1.33 Frequency of FPSQR= 2% CPI of FPSQR = 20 Assume that the two design alternatives are to decrease the CPI of FPSQR to 2 or to decrease the average CPI of all FP operations to 2.5. Compare these two design alternatives using the processor performance equation. 18. Give the comparison of performance and price-performance for the Desktop and servers. 19. Brief about the Fallacies and pitfalls of computer architecture. UNIT 2 1. What is Pipelining? Explain the basics of a RISC Instruction Set. 2. Give the step of simple implementation of a RISC Instruction Set. 3. (a)What are the basic performance issues in pipelining. (b) Consider the unpipelined processor in the previous section. Assume that it has a 1ns clock cycle and that it uses 4 cycles for ALU operations and branches and 5 cycles for memory operations. Assume that the relative frequencies of these operations are 40%, 20%, and 40%, respectively. Suppose that due to clock skew and setup, pipelining the processor adds 0.2 ns of overhead to the clock. Ignoring any latency impact, how much speedup in the instruction execution rate will we gain from a pipeline? 4. What are the Major Hurdle of Pipelining? Explain the Performance of Pipelines with Stalls 5. (a) Write about Structural Hazards. (b)How to overcome Structural Hazards? Explain with block diagram. 6. How the pipelining implemented in MIPS? Give the steps. 7. Write brief about different types of exceptions and requirements. 8. What are Data Hazards? How to overcome these Hazards. 9. Write brief about the control Hazards.