Penn State University School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Page 1 of 2 CMPEN 331 – Computer Organization and Design,
Chapter 1 Review Questions
Solve the following problems from the text book:
1- List and briefly define one of the techniques used in contemporary processors to increased speed.
Pipelining: The execution of an instruction involves multiple stages of operation, including fetching the instruction, decoding the opcode, fetching operands, performing a calculation, and so on.
2- Briefly characterize Amdahl’s law.
Amdahl’s law deals with the potential speedup of a program using multiple processors compared to a single processor. The law indicates the amount of speedup as a function of the fraction of code that can be executed in parallel.
3- List the desirable characteristics of a bench mark program.
a. It is written in a high-level language, making it portable across different machines.
b. It is representative of a particular kind of programming domain or paradigm, such as systems
programming, numerical programming, or commercial programming.
c. It can be measured easily.
d. It has wide distribution.
4- What are the SPEC benchmarks?
This is a collection of benchmark suites is defined and maintained by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC).
5- Consider two different machines, with two different instruction sets, both of which have a clock rate of 200 MHz. The following measurements are recorded on the two machines running a given set of bench mark programs.
Instruction type
Instruction Count (millions)
Cycles per Instruction
Machine A ALU
Load and store Branch
Others
8 4 2 4
1 3 4 3
Machine B ALU
Load and store Branch
Others
10 8 2 4
1 2 4 3
Penn State University School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Page 2 of 2
a) Determine the effective CPI, MIPS rate, and execution time for each machine.
b) Comment on the result.
a)
b) Although machine B has a higher MIPS than machine A, it requires a longer CPU time to execute the same set of benchmark programs.