Homework-01

1 Homework 01 Fall 2020 (The year of pandemic that we all are storming through!) Your Name: ____________________________ Homework assignment from Appendix A of Computer Architecture: A Quantitative approach by Hennessy and Patterson (6 th Edition) Submit all your solutions electronically to Canvas in a PDF format. TOTAL POINTS = 100 Question 1 (10 points) Consider a C struct that includes the following members: Note that for C, the compiler must keep the elements of the struct in the same order as given in the struct definition. For a 32-bit machine, what is the size of the foo struct? What is the minimum size required for this struct, assuming you may arrange the order of the struct members as you wish? Use padding where need be. Read Appendix A.3 (in the 5 th or the 6 th edition) and lecture notes to work through your answers. Question 2 (10 points) The design of MIPS (or RISC V) provides for 32 general-purpose registers and 32 floating-point registers. If registers are good, are more registers better? List and discuss as many trade-offs as you can that should be considered by instruction set architecture designers examining whether to, and how much to, increase the number of MIPS registers. struct foo { char a; bool b; int c; double d; short e; float f; double g; char * cptr; float * fptr; int x; };

2 Refer to Appendix A.2 (in the 5 th or the 6 th edition) and/or Class notes. Question 3 (5 points) Translate the following hexadecimal to decimal 0xabcdef12 Question 4 (30 points {each question carries 10 points} ) One challenge for architects is that the design created today will require several years of implementation, verification, and testing before appearing on the market. This means that the architect must project what the technology will be like several years in advance. Sometimes, this is difficult to do. Refer to the figure below (taken from the 6 th edition) Figure 1.11 Read Section 1.5 in the 5 th or the 6 th edition to better understand the question and give your answers. For each of the questions, write the steps and not just the final answer. a) The increase in clock rates once mirrored this trend. Had clock rates continued to 1 10 100 1000 10,000 1978 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018 Clock rate (MHz) Intel Pentium4 Xeon 3200 MHz in 2003 Intel Skylake Core i7 4200 MHz in 2017 Intel Pentium III 1000 MHz in 2000 Digital Alpha 21164A 500 MHz in 1996 Digital Alpha 21064 150 MHz in 1992 MIPS M2000 25 MHz in 1989 Digital VAX-11/780 5 MHz in 1978 Sun-4 SPARC 16.7 MHz in 1986 15%/year 40%/year 2%/year Figure 1.11 Growth in clock rate of microprocessors in Figure 1.1 . Between 1978 and 1986, the clock rate improved less than 15% per year while performance improved by 22% per year. During the “ renaissance period ” of 52% per- formance improvement per year between 1986 and 2003, clock rates shot up almost 40% per year. Since then, the clock rate has been nearly flat, growing at less than 2% per year, while single processor performance improved recently at just 3.5% per year.

4 Question 6 (10 points) Listen to Prof. David Patterson’s talk from the Virtual Heidelberg Forum 2020 and list 3 of your “oh my goodness or aha” moments from the talk! In other words, 3 new things that you learnt. If you learnt more than just 3, do list them as well, I will be happy to read them! J https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlVJzJD4fqM&feature=emb_rel_pause