E&CE 720-topic4: Asn-3: Processors, Data-Dependencies, and Threads

 

Overview

Due: Mon Apr 4 12pm. Hand in at Mark's office, mailbox, or send PDF. You may turn in neatly written/drawn answers, there is no need to type up your answers (although typed anwers are fine).

Purpose: Review concepts on processor architectures, register-register data-dependency optimizations, and threads from chapters 5--9.

Tasks

Answer each of the following questions. The bold numbers are questions from the textbook.

  1. 5.7--5.13 Branch prediction
  2. 6.6 P6 pipe depth
  3. 7.1: PowerPC 620 vs P6 load/store forwarding
  4. 7.2: PowerPC 620 vs P6 mispredict recovery
  5. 7.6: P6 ROB
  6. 10.14--10.16 Value prediction in hardware
  7. 11.24--11.25 Multithreading and memory interface
  8. 11.26--11.27: Coarse-grained multithreading and O-o-O execution.

Additional problems, suggested for studying, but not part of the homework.

  1. 7.7: P6 Retirement
  2. 9.2, 9.3 Branch prediction and history
  3. 10.18: Speedup for swm256 benchmark.

Marking

The focus of the marking will be on your ability to apply the concepts from the textbook and lecture to answer the questions. Almost all of the questions have multiple correct answers.

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