Pollachi Institute of Engineering and Technology

Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering

EC6009-ADVANCED COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE

QUESTION BANK

Unit 1
1. What is the Cost of die?
2. What is the cost per wafer?
3. What is the fraction or percentage of good dies on a wafer number, or the die yield?
4. What should a computer designer remember about chip costs?
5. Why should a computer architecture book contain pricing information?
6. When we say one computer is faster than another, what do we mean?
7. Define wall-clock time, response time, or elapsed time.
8. Explain Amdahl’s Law.
9. Explain CPI with formula.
10. What is the Cost of integrated circuit?
11. What are the five trends in computer technology
12. How to find the cost of an IC?.
13. Define spatial and temporal locality
14. What is dependability?

Unit -2

1. Define register renaming?

2. List out the constraints imposed by control dependences?
3. Define dynamic scheduling? List the advantages if dynamic scheduling?
4. Differentiate in-order and out-order execution of instruction.
5. What are the three stages of Tomasulo algorithm?
6. What are the components of hardware based speculation?
7. List out the fields in each ROB entry?
8. What is loop unrolling?
9. What are the benefits of speculating through multiple branches?
10. Why do we need branch prediction?
11. Explain the idea behind dynamic scheduling?
12. Give an example for data dependence .
13. list the majour disadvantages of dynamic scheduling using tomosulo’s approach.
14. What is data hazard?

Unit – 3
1. List out the components of IBM cell processor.
2. What do you mean by SISD
3. What do you mean by MIMD?
4. What do you mean by SIMD?
5. What do you mean by MISD?
6. Draw the vector architecture.
7. Explain the loop level parallelism data dependence
8. Explain the loop iteration dependence
9. What is super block
10. Discuss Flynn’s taxonomy?
11. Differentiate GPU and CPU.
12. What are the primary components of instruction set architecture of VMIPS.
13. Describe the similarities and differences between multimedia SIMD computer and GPU?
14. What are the omission in the SIMD extension instruction set?

Unit – 4

1. Compare memory constrained and time constrained scaling.

2. Give a summary of performance of distributed shared memory multiprocessors.
3. What is SMT? What are the design challenges in SMT processors?
4. Define the models used for consistency
5. What are the operations that a directory based protocol handle?
6. What are the disadvantages of symmetric shared memory?
7. What are the various atomic synchronization primitives?
8. What is load locked and store conditional instructions?
9. Compare true sharing and false sharing misses.
10. What are spin locks with exponential back-off?
11. List the six methods for providing synchronization in threads
12. Define sequential consistency
13. What is multicore architecture?
14. What is the majour disadvantage of DSM architecture?

Unit –5
1.Define the terms: Cache, Cache hit and Cache miss
2.Define Cache Miss rate.
3.Compare temporal and spatial locality.
4.What is a page fault?
5.How to reduce cache miss penalty? What are the various optimizations available?
6.Compare local and global miss rate.
7.What is multilevel inclusion?
8.What are critical word first and early restart techniques?
9.Define Cache Miss penalty
10. Define different errors
11. List the six basic optimization technique of cache
12. What are the types of storage devices?
13. What are the similarities and differences between SCSI and IDE?
14. Explain the need to implement memory as a hierarchy.