FUNDAMENTALS OF COMPUTER DESIGN

Introduction
Today’s desktop computers (less than $500 cost) are having more performance,
larger memory and storage than a computer bought in 1085 for 1 million dollar. Highest
performance microprocessors of today outperform Supercomputers of less than 10 years
ago. The rapid improvement has come both from advances in the technology used to
build computers and innovations made in the computer design or in other words, the
improvement made in the computers can be attributed to innovations of technology and
architecture design.
During the first 25 years of electronic computers, both forces made a major
contribution, delivering performance improvement of about 25% per year.
Microprocessors were evolved during late 1970s and their ability along with
improvements made in the Integrated Circuit (IC) technology contributed to 35%
performance growth per year.
The virtual elimination of assembly language programming reduced the need for
object-code compatibility. The creation of standardized vendor-independent operating
system lowered the cost and risk of bringing out a new architecture.
In the yearly 1980s, the Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) based machines
focused the attention of designers on two critical performance techniques, the
exploitation Instruction Level Parallelism (ILP) and the use of caches. The figure 1.1
shows the growth in processor performance since the mid 1980s. The graph plots
performance relative to the VAX-11/780 as measured by the SPECint benchmarks. From
the figure it is clear that architectural and organizational enhancements led to 16 years of
sustained growth in performance at an annual rate of over 50%.

Since 2002, processor performance improvement has dropped to about 20% per year due
to the following hurdles:
 Maximum power dissipation of air-cooled chips 
  Little ILP left to exploit efficiently 
 Limitations laid by memory latency 

The hurdles signals historic switch from relying solely on ILP to Thread Level
Parallelism (TLP) and Data Level Parallelism (DLP).

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Classes of Computers

The evolution of various classes of computers:

1960: Large Main frames (Millions of $ )
(Applications: Business Data processing, large Scientific computing)
1970: Minicomputers (Scientific laboratories, Time sharing concepts)
1980: Desktop Computers (µPs) in the form of Personal computers and workstations.
(Larger Memory, more computing power, Replaced Time sharing systems)
1990: Emergence of Internet and WWW, PDAs, emergence of high performance digital
consumer electronics
2000: Cell phones
These changes in computer use have led to three different computing classes each

characterized by different applications, requirements and computing technologies.

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Desktop computing

The first and still the largest market in dollar terms is desktop computing. Desktop
computing system cost range from $ 500 (low end) to $ 5000 (high-end configuration).
Throughout this range in price, the desktop market tends to drive to optimize price-
performance. The performance concerned is compute performance and graphics
performance. The combination of performance and price are the driving factors to the
customers and the computer designer. Hence, the newest, high performance and cost
effective processor often appears first in desktop computers.

Servers:

Servers provide large-scale and reliable computing and file services and are mainly
used in the large-scale enterprise computing and web based services. The three important
characteristics of servers are:
 Dependability: Severs must operate 24x7 hours a week. Failure of server system
is far more catastrophic than a failure of desktop. Enterprise will lose revenue if
 the server is unavailable. 
 Scalability: as the business grows, the server may have to provide more
functionality/ services. Thus ability to scale up the computing capacity, memory,
 storage and I/O bandwidth is crucial. 
 Throughput: transactions completed per minute or web pages served per second
are crucial for servers. 

Embedded Computers

Simple embedded microprocessors are seen in washing machines, printers,

network switches, handheld devices such as cell phones, smart cards video game devices
etc. embedded computers have the widest spread of processing power and cost. The
primary goal is often meeting the performance need at a minimum price rather than
achieving higher performance at a higher price. The other two characteristic requirements
are to minimize the memory and power.
In many embedded applications, the memory can be substantial portion of the
systems cost and it is very important to optimize the memory size in such cases. The
application is expected to fit totally in the memory on the processor chip or off chip
memory. The importance of memory size translates to an emphasis on code size which is
dictated by the application. Larger memory consumes more power. All these aspects are
considered while choosing or designing processor for the embedded applications.
Defining Computer Architecture
The computer designer has to ascertain the attributes that are important for a new
computer and design the system to maximize the performance while staying within cost,
power and availability constraints. The task has few important aspects such as Instruction
Set design, Functional organization, Logic design and implementation.
Instruction Set Architecture (ISA)
ISA refers to the actual programmer visible Instruction set. The ISA serves as
boundary between the software and hardware. The seven dimensions of the ISA are:

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i) Class of ISA: Nearly all ISAs today are classified as General-Purpose-
Register architectures. The operands are either Registers or Memory locations.
The two popular versions of this class are:
Register-Memory ISAs : ISA of 80x86, can access memory as part of many
instructions.
Load-Store ISA Eg. ISA of MIPS, can access memory only with Load or
Store instructions.
ii) Memory addressing: Byte addressing scheme is most widely used in all
desktop and server computers. Both 80x86 and MIPS use byte addressing.
Incase of MIPS the object must be aligned. An access to an object of s byte at
byte address A is aligned if A mod s =0. 80x86 does not require alignment.
Accesses are faster if operands are aligned.
iii) Addressing modes:
Specify the address of a M object apart from register and constant operands.
MIPS Addressing modes:
  Register mode addressing 
 Immediate mode addressing 
 Displacement mode addressing 
80x86 in addition to the above addressing modes supports the
additional modes of addressing:
i. Register Indirect
ii. Indexed
iii. Based with Scaled index

iv) Types and sizes of operands:

MIPS and x86 support:
 8 bit (ASCII character), 16 bit(Unicode character) 
 32 bit (Integer/word) 
 64 bit (long integer/ Double word) 
 32 bit (IEEE-754 floating point) 
  64 bit (Double precision floating point) 
 80x86 also supports 80 bit floating point operand.(extended
 double precision) 
v) Operations: The general category of operations are:
o Data Transfer
o Arithmetic operations
o Logic operations
o Control operations
o MIPS ISA: simple & easy to implement
o x86 ISA: richer & larger set of operations
vi) Control flow instructions:
All ISAs support:
Conditional & Unconditional Branches
Procedure Calls & Returns

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 MIPS 80x86
• Conditional Branches tests content of Register Condition code bits
• Procedure Call JAL CALLF
• Return Address in a R Stack in M
vii) Encoding an ISA

Fixed Length ISA Variable Length ISA

MIPS 32 Bit long 80x86 (1-18 bytes)
Simplifies decoding Takes less space

Number of Registers and number of Addressing modes have significant

impact on the length of instruction as the register field and addressing mode
field can appear many times in a single instruction.

Trends in Technology

The designer must be aware of the following rapid changes in implementation

technology.
 Integrated Circuit (IC) Logic technology 
 Memory technology (semiconductor DRAM technology) 
 Storage or magnetic disk technology 
 Network technology 
IC Logic technology:
Transistor density increases by about 35%per year. Increase in die size
corresponds to about 10% to 20% per year. The combined effect is a growth rate in
transistor count on a chip of about 40% to 55% per year.
Semiconductor DRAM technology: capacity increases by about 40% per year.

Storage Technology:
Before 1990: the storage density increased by about 30% per year.
After 1990: the storage density increased by about 60% per year.
Disks are still 50 to 100 times cheaper per bit than DRAM.

Network Technology:
Network performance depends both on the performance of the switches and on
the performance of the transmission system.
Although the technology improves continuously, the impact of these improvements can
be in discrete leaps.
Performance trends: Bandwidth or throughput is the total amount of work done in given
time. Latency or response time is the time between the start and the completion of an
event. (for eg. Millisecond for disk access)

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The two main measures of Dependability are Module Reliability and Module
Availability. Module reliability is a measure of continuous service accomplishment (or
time to failure) from a reference initial instant.

1. Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) measures Reliability

2. Failures In Time (FIT) = 1/MTTF, the rate of failures
• Traditionally reported as failures per billion hours of operation
• Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) measures Service Interruption
– Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) = MTTF+MTTR
• Module availability measures service as alternate between the 2 states of
accomplishment and interruption (number between 0 and 1, e.g. 0.9)
• Module availability = MTTF / ( MTTF + MTTR)

Example:
Calculate Failures in Time(FIT) and MTTF for the following system comprising of:
10 disks (1Million hour MTTF per disk), 1 disk controller (0.5Million hour MTTF) and 1
power supply (0.2Million hour MTTF).

FailureRate  10  (1 /1,000,000)  1 / 500,000  1 / 200,000

  10  2  5 / 1,000,000 
  17 / 1,000,000 
 17,000FIT 
MTTF 1,000,000,000 / 17,000
≈ 59,000hours

Performance:
The Execution time or Response time is defined as the time between the start and
completion of an event. The total amount of work done in a given time is defined as the
Throughput.
The Administrator of a data center may be interested in increasing the
Throughput. The computer user may be interested in reducing the Response time.

Computer user says that computer is faster when a program runs in less time.

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 1
Performance = ----------------------------
Execution Time (X)

The phrase “X is faster than Y” is used to mean that the response time or execution time
is lower on X than Y for the given task. “X is n times faster than Y” means

Execution Timey = n* Execution timex

Performancex = n* Perfromancey

The routinely executed programs are the best candidates for evaluating the performance
of the new computers. To evaluate new system the user would simply compare the
execution time of their workloads.
Benchmarks
The real applications are the best choice of benchmarks to evaluate the performance.
However, for many of the cases, the workloads will not be known at the time of
evaluation. Hence, the benchmark program which resemble the real applications are
chosen. The three types of benchmarks are:
 KERNELS, which are small, key pieces of real applications; 

 Toy Programs: which are 100 line programs from beginning programming
assignments, such Quicksort etc., 

 Synthetic Benchmarks: Fake programs invented to try to match the profile and
behavior of real applications such as Dhrystone. 
To make the process of evaluation a fair justice, the following points are to be followed.
 Source code modifications are not allowed. 

 Source code modifications are allowed, but are essentially impossible. 

 Source code modifications are allowed, as long as the modified version produces the
same output. 



• To increase predictability, collections of benchmark applications, called
benchmark suites, are popular
• SPECCPU: popular desktop benchmark suite given by Standard Performance
Evaluation committee (SPEC)
– CPU only, split between integer and floating point programs
– SPECint2000 has 12 integer, SPECfp2000 has 14 integer programs
– SPECCPU2006 announced in Spring 2006.
– SPECSFS (NFS file server) and SPECWeb (WebServer) added as server
benchmarks

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 • Transaction Processing Council measures server performance and cost-
performance for databases
– TPC-C Complex query for Online Transaction Processing
– TPC-H models ad hoc decision support
– TPC-W a transactional web benchmark
– TPC-App application server and web services benchmark

• SPEC Ratio: Normalize execution times to reference computer, yielding a ratio

proportional to performance = time on reference computer/time on computer being
rated

• If program SPECRatio on Computer A is 1.25 times bigger than Computer B,

then

ExecutionTimereference
1.25  SPECRatioA  ExecutionTimeA
SPECRatio B ExecutionTimereference
ExecutionTimeB

 ExecutionTimeB  PerformanceA
ExecutionTimeA PerformanceB 

• Note : when comparing 2 computers as a ratio, execution times on the reference

computer drop out, so choice of reference computer is irrelevant.

Quantitative Principles of Computer Design

While designing the computer, the advantage of the following points can be
exploited to enhance the performance.
* Parallelism: is one of most important methods for improving performance.
- One of the simplest ways to do this is through pipelining ie, to over lap the instruction

Exe
cution to reduce the total time to complete an instruction sequence.
- Parallelism can also be exploited at the level of detailed digital design.
- Set- associative caches use multiple banks of memory that are typically searched in
parallel. Carry
look ahead which uses parallelism to speed the process of computing.
* Principle of locality: program tends to reuse data and instructions they have used
recently. The rule of thumb is that program spends 90 % of its execution time in only
10% of the code. With reasonable good accuracy, prediction can be made to find what

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instruction and data the program will use in the near future based on its accesses in the
recent past.
* Focus on the common case while making a design trade off, favor the frequent case
over the infrequent case. This principle applies when determining how to spend
resources, since the impact of the improvement is higher if the occurrence is frequent.

Amdahl’s Law: Amdahl’s law is used to find the performance gain that can be obtained by
improving some portion or a functional unit of a computer Amdahl’s law defines the speedup
that can be gained by using a particular feature.
Speedup is the ratio of performance for entire task without using the enhancement when
possible to the performance for entire task without using the enhancement. Execution
time is the reciprocal of performance. Alternatively, speedup is defined as thee ratio of
execution time for entire task without using the enhancement to the execution time for
entair task using the enhancement when possible.
Speedup from some enhancement depends an two factors:
i. The fraction of the computation time in the original computer that can be
converted to
take advantage of the enhancement. Fraction enhanced is always less than or
equal to
Example: If 15 seconds of the execution time of a program that takes 50
seconds in
total can use an enhancement, the fraction is 15/50 or 0.3

ii. The improvement gained by the enhanced execution mode; ie how much
faster the task
would run if the enhanced mode were used for the entire program. Speedup
enhanced
is the time of the original mode over the time of the enhanced mode and is
always
greater then 1.

[
Execution time new = Execution time old X (1- Fraction enhanced) + Fraction enhanced ]
Speed up enhanced

Speedup overall = Execution time old

Execution time new

The Processor performance Equation:

Processor is connected with a clock running at constant rate. These discrete time events
are called clock ticks or clock cycle.
CPU time for a program can be evaluated:

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CPU time = CPU clock cycles for a program X clock cycle time

CPU time = CPU Clock cycles for a program

Clock rate

Using the number of clock cycle and the Instruction count (IC), it is possible to determine

the average number of clock cycles per instruction (CPI). The reciprocal of CPI gives

Instruction per clock (IPC)

CPI= CPU clock cycle for a program

Instruction count

CPU time = IC X CPI X Clock cycle time

CPU time = Seconds

program

= Instructions X Clock cycles X Seconds

Program Instruction clock cycle

Processor performance depends on IC, CPI and clock rate or clock cycle. There 3

parameters are dependent on the following basic technologies.

Clock Cycle time – H/W technology and organization

CPI- organization and ISA

IC- ISA and compiler – technology

Example:

A System contains Floating point (FP) and Floating Point Square Root (FPSQR) unit.
FPSQR is responsible for 20% of the execution time. One proposal is to enhance the
FPSQR hardware and speedup this operation by a factor of 15 second alternate is just to
try to make all FP instructions run faster by a factor of 1.6 times faster with the same
effort as required for the fast FPSQR, compare the two design alternative

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Option 1

SpeedupFPSQR = 1 = 1.2295

(1-0.2) + (0.2/15)
Option 2

Speedup FP = 1 = 1.2307
(1-0.5) + (0.5/1.6)

Option 2 is relatively better.

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