CSE340: Computer Architecture
Assignment 1
Chapter 1 (Computer Abstractions and Technology)
Question - 1:
What do you understand by “Dependability via Redundancy” in terms of
computer architecture? Why is it important to keep redundancy while designing a
system?
Question - 2:
X is an IC manufacturing company. They have an order for 9900 IC chips. They
started their manufacturing process with 10 silicon ingots each with a radius of 7
cm. Each die should have an area of 1.55 cm2.
A. What is the area of the wafers they are making and how many dies can they
make per wafer?
B. During manufacturing, they discovered that the wafers had 0.035
defects/cm2. Find out the value of yield and comment on it according to the
definition of yield.
C. Find out the cost per die if one wafer costs 13 units. Find out the total
number of dies if they can make 10 wafers per ingot and the total cost of
making 9900 dies.
D. Can they fulfill their order? Explain why or why not.
Question - 3:
a. Explain Amdahl’s Law in your own words.
b. Can you relate/connect Amdahl’s law with any of the design principles,
mentioned below? Explain the reason with an example.
Design Principle
1 Performance via Prediction
2 Performance via Pipelining
3 Make the common case faster
4 Use Abstraction to Simplify Design
Question - 4:
To calculate the benchmark of a system, why do we take the geometric mean
instead of only taking the average of the individual spec ratios?
2
Question - 5:
We are building a calculator. Below is the program of the calculator app converted
to assembly language,
Line No. Instruction Line No. Instruction
1 add ................. 10 sub ................
2 add ................. 11 mul ................
3 add ................. 12 sub ................
4 add ................. 13 sub ................
5 mul ................ 14 add .................
6 addi ................. 15 addi .................
7 add ................ 16 sub ................
8 add ................. 17 mul ................
9 add ................. 18 sub ................
CPI for add, sub, mul, and addi instructions are respectively 2, 3, 4, and 5. The
duration of a clock cycle is 3s.
a. What is the total number of instructions in the above-mentioned program?
b. What is the execution time of this program?
c. What is the Clock rate?
d. If you want to make the system faster and you can only speed up one type of
instruction, which instruction would you choose and why?
e. Suppose you want to reduce the current execution time by 1.2 times. What
improvement factor would be required for the chosen instruction in question d?
