Midterm 1 -- Closed book section

23 February, 1995

The entire exam is to be turned in at 5:45 PM. Work the closed book section first and turn it in before you consult your books and notes to work on the open book section. The use of calculators is forbidden during the closed book section of the exam.

Problem 1. (20 points)

Briefly explain the differences between the following pairs of terms?

• Arithmetic shift vs. logical shift
• CISC vs. RISC
• Direct address mode vs. indirect address mode
• MIMD vs. SIMD
• OR vs. Exclusive-OR
• Scalar operation vs. vector operation
• Supervisor mode vs. user mode

Problem 2. (10 points)

Give brief one or two sentence definitions for the following five terms:

• Branch Target Buffer (BTB)
• Computer architecture
• Data dependency
• Program counter
• Stack pointer

Problem 3. (3 points)

How many bits are needed to address all the registers in a machine that has 32 registers?

Problem 4. (3 points)

How many bits are needed to address all the bytes of a machine that has 16777216 bytes?

Problem 5. (4 points)

Why did the designers of the Alpha AXP processors assume that most backward conditional branches will be taken?

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