ECEN 350 Exam 1 Studying questions
with complete solutions
Moore's Law
The number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits doubles every year.
Computer processor cores directly execute the high-level code you write
False
A higher frequency processor will always have higher performance than a lower frequency
processor.
False
An easy way to reduce the energy consumption needed to compute a given job is to decrease
its ___________.
Frequency, clock, or GHz
Decreasing response time should have no impact on throughput.
False
,The processor directly executes the code you write in C, Java, C++, etc.
False
There is a one-to-one matching between lines of C and lines of an assembly language.
False
There is a one-to-one matching between lines of an assembly language and lines of its machine
language.
True
The compiler will always produce better performing assembly than a human can.
False
Given the following mix of instruction classes and CPIs, calculate the weighted average CPI for
the program on a given CPU.
Class A:
percentage: 30%
CPI: 2
Class B:
percentage: 20%
CPI: 3
Class C:
percentage: 50%
, CPI: 1
1.7
Given two different computers A and B of the same ISA, running the same application binary,
what is the speedup of A over B?
A: CPI = 1.5, Frequency = 2GHz
B: CPI = 1, Frequency = 1.5GHz
CPUtimea = I*1.5/2GHz
CPUtimeb = I*1/1.5GHz
Speedup a/b = 2G/1.5*1.5G = .8889
Imagine you have converted a single threaded program to multi-threaded so it can execute on a
multi-core processor. You can support as many threads as there are processors but there
remains a 5% overhead which cannot be parallelized. What is the maximum speedup you can
expect with an infinite core machine?
20x
___________ is a good measure of the time a processor spent on a given job.
CPU time
ARMv8 and many other RISC ISAs are considered to be a "Load/Store Architecture" because
many computational instructions operate directly on the memory.
with complete solutions
Moore's Law
The number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits doubles every year.
Computer processor cores directly execute the high-level code you write
False
A higher frequency processor will always have higher performance than a lower frequency
processor.
False
An easy way to reduce the energy consumption needed to compute a given job is to decrease
its ___________.
Frequency, clock, or GHz
Decreasing response time should have no impact on throughput.
False
,The processor directly executes the code you write in C, Java, C++, etc.
False
There is a one-to-one matching between lines of C and lines of an assembly language.
False
There is a one-to-one matching between lines of an assembly language and lines of its machine
language.
True
The compiler will always produce better performing assembly than a human can.
False
Given the following mix of instruction classes and CPIs, calculate the weighted average CPI for
the program on a given CPU.
Class A:
percentage: 30%
CPI: 2
Class B:
percentage: 20%
CPI: 3
Class C:
percentage: 50%
, CPI: 1
1.7
Given two different computers A and B of the same ISA, running the same application binary,
what is the speedup of A over B?
A: CPI = 1.5, Frequency = 2GHz
B: CPI = 1, Frequency = 1.5GHz
CPUtimea = I*1.5/2GHz
CPUtimeb = I*1/1.5GHz
Speedup a/b = 2G/1.5*1.5G = .8889
Imagine you have converted a single threaded program to multi-threaded so it can execute on a
multi-core processor. You can support as many threads as there are processors but there
remains a 5% overhead which cannot be parallelized. What is the maximum speedup you can
expect with an infinite core machine?
20x
___________ is a good measure of the time a processor spent on a given job.
CPU time
ARMv8 and many other RISC ISAs are considered to be a "Load/Store Architecture" because
many computational instructions operate directly on the memory.
