Final exam -- Closed book section

9 May, 1995

The entire exam is to be turned in at 7:00 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 (10 points)

Briefly explain the differences between the following pairs of terms.

• memory-mapped I/O vs. programmed I/O
• direct address mode vs. indirect address mode
• virtual address vs. physical address
• pages vs. frames
• write through vs. write back

Problem 2. (8 points)

What contributions did the following people make to computer architecture?

• Booth
• Cray
• Lukasiewicz
• Mano

Problem 3 (5 points)

What do the following five acronyms abbreviate?

• CPU
• DMA
• DRAM
• RISC
• SIMD

Problem 4 (5 points)

Choose five of the following eight acronyms and state what they abbreviate. If you give answers for more than five, only the first five answers will be graded.

• ASCII
• CCW
• CRC
• HDLC
• PSW
• TLB
• ROM
• UART

Problem 5 (10 points)

What are reasonable estimates of the time required to perform the following operations in a modern microprocessor? Try to get within a factor of two of the right answer.

• Execute an addition instruction through all clock cycles
• Execute a division instruction through all clock cycles
• Read a word from SRAM
• Read a word from DRAM
• Read a data block from a disk

Problem 6 (3 points)

Would you expect a RISC computer to have a single instruction that added the contents of a memory location to a register and stored that result into another register? Give a one or two sentence justification for your answer.

Problem 7 (2 points)

How many bits are needed to address all the bytes of a machine that has 33554432 bytes? By the way, 33554432 is a power of two.

Problem 8 (2 points)

Which operation of the Pentium was infested by a rather well-known bug?

Problem 9 (2 points)

Most top-of-the-line personal computers sold today have two levels of caches. Where are these caches located?

Problem 10 (3 points)

Distinguish amount the following three types of cache organization.

• direct mapping
• associative mapping
• set-associative mapping

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