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RTSEC Documentation

This document discusses relevant tools, standards, and engineering constraints for computer architecture. It covers several topics: design goals which balance various constraints like cost, performance, and power consumption; how clock speed is an imperfect measure of performance and manufacturers have abandoned it as an indicator; the importance of reducing power consumption with technological advances like Moore's law; an overview of instruction set architecture and what instructions specify; and the driving forces of computer systems being energy and cost minimization while exploiting different types of parallelism in applications and hardware.

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Mark Jomaoas
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89 views4 pages

RTSEC Documentation

This document discusses relevant tools, standards, and engineering constraints for computer architecture. It covers several topics: design goals which balance various constraints like cost, performance, and power consumption; how clock speed is an imperfect measure of performance and manufacturers have abandoned it as an indicator; the importance of reducing power consumption with technological advances like Moore's law; an overview of instruction set architecture and what instructions specify; and the driving forces of computer systems being energy and cost minimization while exploiting different types of parallelism in applications and hardware.

Uploaded by

Mark Jomaoas
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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RIZAL TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL PAGE 1

RELEVANT TOOLS,
STANDARDS
AND/OR
ENGINEERING
CONSTRAINTS

Student name: Jazz Vierras Section: PCEIT-03-701P

Professor: Ezekiel Nequit Subject: COA/L


RIZAL TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL PAGE 1

RELEVANT TOOLS, STANDARDS AND/OR ENGINEERING CONSTRAINTS

Design goals

The precise shape of a computer system is determined by the constraints


and objectives for which it was designed. Standards, cost, memory space,
latency, and throughput are typically traded off in computer architectures. Other
variables, such as features, scale, weight, reliability, expandability, and power
consumption, are also taken into account. The most popular method carefully
selects the bottleneck that slows down the machine the most. In an ideal world,
the cost will be distributed proportionally to ensu re that the data rate for all parts
of the computer is approximately the same, with the most expensive component
being the slowest. Commercial integrators that are skilled at optimizing personal
computers do so in this manner.

Cost

Costs are generally kept constant, and are dictated by device or


commercial criteria.

Performance

The clock speed of a computer is often used to describe its output (usually
in MHz or GHz). This is the number of cycles per second that the CPU's main
clock runs at. However, this measure can be deceiving, as a system with a
higher clock rate does not always mean it will work better. As a result,
manufacturers have abandoned clock speed as an output indicator.
The speed of a computer may also be affected. The amount of cache a
processor has can also be used to assess computer performance. If the rpm,
measured in MHz or GHz, were a vehicle, the cache would be a traffic light. A
green traffic light will not stop the vehicle, no matter how fast it is driving. The
faster a processor runs, the higher its speed and the larger its cache.
RIZAL TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL PAGE 1

Power consumption

Another quality criterion that influences the design of modern computers is


power consumption. Power efficiency is often exchanged for results or cost
savings. Power efficiency has become more important as the number of
transistors per chip scales (Moore's Law), owing to the the power density of
modern circuits. Recent processor designs, such as the Intel I7, have placed a
greater focus on increasing performance. Recent processor designs, such as the
Intel I7, have puta greater focus on energy efficiency. In addition, power
efficiency has long been and continues to be the primary design objective in
embedded computing, second only to success.

Instruction Set Architecture

Computer architecture composes of computer organization and


the Instruction Set Architecture, ISA. ISA gives a logical view of what a
computer is capable of doing and when you look at computer organization, it
basically talks about how ISA is implemented. Both these put together is normally
called computer architecture and, in this course, we are trying to cover both the
computer organization part as well as the ISA part.

To give a basic idea about what an instruction is, we will


look at some sample instructions. Instructions basically specify
commands to the processor, like transferring information from one point to
another within a computer, say, for example, from one register to another
register, from a memory location to a register or an input output device. You will
have specific instructions which will say transfer the information from this source
to this destination. So, instructions basically specify commands to either transfer
information from one-point to another within a computer, instruct the computer to
perform arithmetic and logical operations like multiply these two numbers, etc.
You need to also have some instructions to control the flow of the program. Say
for example, I’m trying to add two numbers, and if the result is greater than
something I want to take one course of action and if the result is less than
something, I want to take a different course of action.

There has been a lot of technological improvements that has been


happening starting from 1951 – from vacuum tubes we went into transistors, ICs,
VLSIs, ultra-scale ICs, so on and so forth. We find that the processor transistor
RIZAL TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL PAGE 1

counts have increased about 32 to 40% every year, thanks to Moore’s Law.
Moore’s Law was basically proposed by Gordon Moore of Intel in 1965and he
proposed that the transistor densities are going to be doubled every 18 to 24
months and that has really been holding good. The memory capacity also has
gone up to about 60% per year. All these technological advancements give room
for better or new applications. The applications demand more and more and the
processors are becoming better and better and this is vicious cycle. The
performance improved greatly from 1978 to 2005. After 2005, you find that the
performance has actually slowed down due to what is called the power wall and
the memory wall.

The main driving forces of computer systems are energy and cost. Today
everybody is striving to design computer systems which will minimize your
energy and cost. Also, we’ll have to look at the different types of parallelism that
your applications exhibit and try to exploit this parallelism in the computer
systems that we designed. So that becomes the primary driving force of a
computer system. The different types of parallelism that programs may exhibit
are called data level parallelism and task level parallelism. You need to design
systems that exploit them. There are different techniques that processors use to
exploit parallelism. Even in a sequential execution, there are different techniques
available to exploit the instruction level parallelism, ILP, i.e., executing
independent instructions parallel. When there is data level parallelism available in
programs, vector processors and SIMD style of architectures try to exploit them.
Processors also look at having multiple threads of execution. Thread level
parallelism is exploited more in terms of task level parallelism and when it is done
in a more loosely coupled architecture, we call it a request level parallelism. So,
applications exhibit different types of parallelism and the computer hardware that
you’re designing should try to exploit that parallelism and try to give
better performance. To summarize, in this module, we pointed out why
you need to study computer architecture, that is, the motivation for the
course, what is it that you are going to study in this computer architecture course,
and then be pointed out the functional units of a digital computer and how they
are interconnected, what is meant by a traditional von Neumann architecture.
Last of all, we pointed out the different classes of computer systems and the
driving forces that are driving us to come up with better and better computer
architectures in order to exploit the parallelism that is available among the
various applications and also bring down the energy and cost.

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