Week 7
Schedule
This activity runs in week 7 (16-20 November) with the scheduled lab on Monday 16 November. This means that you need to have done the necessary preparation in week 6 (9-13 November).
Preparation
Before the scheduled lab, all students must complete the following tasks.
• Read chapters 1 and 2 of Structured Computer Organisation (Tanenbaum). Both physical and electronic copies are available from the University of Bristol library. There will be a quiz on these readings in the lab session.
• Watch the video on Stack Machines and RPN.
Stack Machines and RPN (Included recordings online)
Default Presenter COMSM1302 / Stacks
Session activity – Tanenbaum Chapter 1
When instructed during the session, every student individually answers the following questions, noting their answers with pen and paper or using a notepad application. It is fine if not everyone can answer all the questions correctly.
Later on in the session, you will go over the same question again and agree on answers for each question as a group.
Remember that everyone comes from a different background, and show respect for each other.
1. What is a machine language? Give an example of a basic instruction you might find in a machine language.
2. What is the difference between translation and interpretation of programs?
3. What is the rationale for having lots of different levels of languages in a computer?
Why not just build a processor with C as its machine language?
4. What is a microprogram?
5. What improvement did Operating Systems make in the 1960s?
6. Why did manufacturers start departing from microprogramming again, starting in the
1970s?
7. When did Ada Lovelace live, and what was her contribution to computing?
8. When and where was the transistor invented, and what did it replace?
9. What feature of the DEC PDP-8 has become nearly universal since its introduction?
10. How did the ARM processor architecture get its name, and what is special about ARM as opposed to other hardware companies?
Session activity – Tanenbaum Chapter 2
1. Where did the single-bus CPU layout (e.g. Figure 2-2) originate?
2. What is a data path, and what is the data path cycle?
3. What happens during the ‘decode’ part of the fetch-decode-execute cycle?
4. Define RISC and CISC?
5. In RISC design, which kind of instructions are allowed to access memory (RAM) and
why?
6. What is the difference between a pipelined and a superscalar processor? Can a
processor be both at once?
7. What is the difference between a SIMD and a vectorised instrcution or processor?
8. Define big and little endian?
9. When speaking of disc drives, what does IDE stand for and refer to? What is the ‘serial’
part in sATA and what advantages does it have?
10. What is the ‘flash’ in a flash drive (a.k.a. solid-state drive or SSD)?
11. What did the High Sierra meeting decide to standardise for CD-ROMs, and why?
12. In a single-bus architecture, a controller using DMA and the CPU both want to write to
memory at the same time. What component handles this situation, which of the two (DMA controller or CPU) gets priority and why?
Session activity – Stacks (Included files)
Attached Files: stacks.pdf (269.504 KB) stacks.c (3.305 KB)
The activity is in the attached PDF file.
Session activity – Tanenbaum 1-2 Research Questions
As a group, research online and discuss these questions which build on the material in Tanenbaum. You might want to split the group into several sub-groups, or have each member research a different question and then report back to the group in a plenary session at the end.
For each question that you have answered, a group member makes a blog post sharing your results with the rest of the class after the session has ended.
Make sure you reference the sources you have used in your blog posts.
Chapter 1
1. Give at least three examples each of translated (a.k.a. compiled) and interpreted programming languages.
2. The 80386 had many other novel features beyond what Tanenbaum mentions. Research what the new ‘MMU’ in the 80386 did. What benefit does this provide for running programs?
3. Define Moore’s law, then research the debate into whether it still holds or not today. What are the main arguments on each side? As a group, agree on your own conclusion.
Chapter 2
1. Define a ‘von Neumann’ architecture, and explain what the main alternative is called and how it is different. Then, research and define the ‘von Neumann bottleneck’ and possible solutions to this problem.
2. What are the Intel SIMD and vector instruction set extensions called? Give some examples of instructions in each of these extensions.
3. Are ARM processors big or little endian? What about data sent over the internet, which uses the so-called ‘network byte order’?
4. Research the ‘Memory Hierarchy’: what are typical sizes and access times for (1) Level 3 cache and (2) main memory (RAM)? If a CPU had only a L1 cache and RAM, what would the mean access time be assuming an 80% cache hit rate? Make sure you reference your source(s)!
5. Since the Tanenbaum book was written, PCIe has gone through several more versions. What is the latest version and how fast (MB/s) is it?
6. How would you represent 中国 (‘zhong guo’ = middle country, the name for China in Mandarin Chinese) in UTF-8? What are the unicode code points of the characters involved?
Homework
Make sure you research and revise any content relating to stacks / RPN and Tanenbaum chapters 1-2 that you are not confident about yet.
Before the start of the next session, every group member makes at least one technical blog post, writing about one of the following:
• Your group’s answers to the Tanenbaum Chapter 1 comprehension questions.
• Your group’s answers to the Tanenbaum Chapter 2 comprehension questions.
• One of the research tasks for this week’s activity.
Every student should understand all the concepts covered by the comprehension questions and research tasks, as well as the RPN and stacks content – you may want to organise a group meeting among yourselves outside of class time to help each other with points that you do not understand yet.
Also have a look at the university’s new Living Well, Being Well activity which combines useful information around the themes of Living Well, Feeling Well, Staying Safe and Spending Well to help you through your studies at Bristol.
Finally, you will need to do the preparation tasks for Week 7 before the lab on Monday next week.