The chip select logic for a certain DRAM chip in a memory system design is shown below. Assume that the memory system has 16 address lines denoted by A₁₅ to A₀. What is the range of addresses (in hexadecimal) of the memory system that can get enabled by the chip select (CS) signal?

A certain processor uses a fully associative cache of size 16 kB. The cache block size is 16 bytes. Assume that the main memory is byte addressable and uses a 32-bit address. How many bits are required for the Tag and the Index fields resectively in the addresses generated by the processor?

A certain processor deploys a single-level cache. The cache block size is 8 words and the word size is 4 bytes. The memory system uses a 60-MHz clock. To service a cache miss, the memory controller first takes 1 cycle to accept the starting address of the block, it then takes 3 cycles to fetch all the eight words of the block, and finally transmits the words of the requested block at the rate of 1 word per cycle. The maximum bandwidth for the memory system when the program running on the processor issues a series of read operations is ______ × 10⁶ bytes/sec.

1. Daisy chaining is used to assign priorities in attending interrupts.
2. When a device raises a vectored interrupt, the CPU does polling to identify the source of the interrupt.
3. In polling, the CPU periodically checks the status bits to know if any device needs its attention.
4. During DMA, both the CPU and DMA controller can be bus masters at the same time.

Consider the following processor design characteristics.

I. Register-to-register arithmetic operations only
II. Fixed-length instruction format
III. Hardwired control unit

Which of the characteristics above are used in the design of a RISC processor?

A 32-bit wide main memory unit with a capacity of 1 GB is built using 256M×4-bit DRAM chips. The number of rows of memory cells in the DRAM chip is 2¹⁴. The time taken to perform one refresh operation is 50 nanoseconds. The refresh period is 2 milliseconds. The percentage (rounded to the closest integer) of the time available for performing the memory read/write operations in the main memory unit is _________.

The following are some events that occur after a device controller issues an interrupt while process L is under execution.

(P) The processor pushes the process status of L onto the control stack.
(Q) The processor finishes the execution of the current instruction.
(R) The processor executes the interrupt service routine.
(S) The processor pops the process status of L from the control stack.
(T) The processor loads the new PC value based on the interrupt.

The size of the physical address space of a processor is 2^P bytes. The word length is 2^W bytes. The capacity of cache memory is 2^N bytes. The size of each cache block is 2^M words. For a K-way set-associative cache memory, the length (in number of bits) of the tag field is

A processor has 16 integer registers (R0, R1, …, R15) and 64 floating point registers (F0, F1, …, F63). It uses a 2-byte instruction format. There are four categories of instructions: Type-1, Type-2, Type-3 and Type-4.Type-1 category consists of four instructions, each with 3 integer register operands (3Rs). Type-2 category consists of eight instructions, each with 2 floating point register operands (2Fs). Type-3 category consists of fourteen instructions, each with one integer register operand and one floating point register operand (1R+1F). Type-4 category consists of N instructions, each with a floating point register operand (1F).

The maximum value of N is ________.

The instruction pipeline of a RISC processor has the following stages: Instruction Fetch (IF), Instruction Decode (ID), Operand Fetch (OF), Perform Operation (PO) and Writeback (WB). The IF, ID, OF and WB stages take 1 clock cycle each for every instruction. Consider a sequence of 100 instructions. In the PO stage, 40 instructions take 3 clock cycles each, 35 instructions take 2 clock cycles each, and the remaining 25 instructions take 1 clock cycle each. Assume that there are no data hazards and no control hazards.

The number of clock cycles required for completion of execution of the sequence of instructions is ___________.

Consider the C struct defined below:

    struct data   {
        int marks [100];
        char grade;
        int cnumber;
    };
    struct data student;

The base address of student is available in register R1. The field student.grade can be accessed efficiently using

Consider a two-level cache hierarchy with L1 and L2 caches. An application incurs 1.4 memory accesses per instruction on average. For this application, the miss rate of L1 cache is 0.1; the L2 cache experiences, on average, 7 misses per 1000 instructions. The miss rate of L2 expressed correct to two decimal places is __________.

Consider a RISC machine where each instruction is exactly 4 bytes long. Conditional and unconditional branch instructions use PC-relative addressing mode with Offset specified in bytes to the target location of the branch instruction. Further the Offset is always with respect to the address of the next instruction in the program sequence. Consider the following instruction sequence

If the target of the branch instruction is i, then the decimal value of the Offset is ___________.

Instruction execution in a processor is divided into 5 stages, Instruction Fetch (IF), Instruction Decode (ID), Operand Fetch (OF), Execute (EX), and Write Back (WB). These stages take 5, 4, 20, 10 and 3 nanoseconds (ns) respectively. A pipelined implementation of the processor requires buffering between each pair of consecutive stages with a delay of 2 ns. Two pipelined implementations of the processor are contemplated:

(i) a naive pipeline implementation (NP) with 5 stages and
(ii) an efficient pipeline (EP) where the OF stage is divided into stages OF1 and OF2 with execution times of 12 ns and 8 ns respectively.

The speedup (correct to two decimal places) achieved by EP over NP in executing 20 independent instructions with no hazards is _________.

Consider a 2-way set associative cache with 256 blocks and uses LRU replacement. Initially the cache is empty. Conflict misses are those misses which occur due to contention of multiple blocks for the same cache set. Compulsory misses occur due to first time access to the block. The following sequence of accesses to memory blocks

     (0, 128, 256, 128, 0, 128, 256, 128, 1, 129, 257, 129, 1, 129, 257, 129)

is repeated 10 times. The number of conflict misses experienced by the cache is __________.

A cache memory unit with capacity of N words and block size of B words is to be designed. If it is designed as a direct mapped cache, the length of the TAG field is 10 bits. If the cache unit is now designed as a 16-way set-associative cache, the length of the TAG field is ___________ bits.

In a two-level cache system, the access times of L₁ and L₂ caches are 1 and 8 clock cycles, respectively. The miss penalty from the L₂ cache to main memory is 18 clock cycles. The miss rate of L₁ cache is twice that of L₂. The average memory access time (AMAT) of this cache system is 2 cycles. The miss rates of L₁ and L₂ respectively are:

Consider a machine with a byte addressable main memory of 2³² bytes divided into blocks of size 32 bytes. Assume that a direct mapped cache having 512 cache lines is used with this machine. The size of the tag field in bits is _____________.

The read access times and the hit ratios for different caches in a memory hierarchy are as given below.

The read access time of main memory is 90 nanoseconds. Assume that the caches use the referred-word-first read policy and the write back policy. Assume that all the caches are direct mapped caches. Assume that the dirty bit is always 0 for all the blocks in the caches. In execution of a program, 60% of memory reads are for instruction fetch and 40% are for memory operand fetch. The average read access time in nanoseconds (up to 2 decimal places) is ___________.

The size of the data count register of a DMA controller is 16 bits. The processor needs to transfer a file of 29,154 kilobytes from disk to main memory. The memory is byte addressable. The minimum number of times the DMA controller needs to get the control of the system bus from the processor to transfer the file from the disk to main memory is ________.

The stage delays in a 4-stage pipeline are 800, 500, 400 and 300 picoseconds. The first stage (with delay 800 picoseconds) is replaced with a functionally equivalent design involving two stages with respective delays 600 and 350 picoseconds. The throughput increase of the pipeline is ________ percent.

A processor has 40 distinct instructions and 24 general purpose registers. A 32-bit instruction word has an opcode, two register operands and an immediate operand. The number of bits available for the immediate operand field is __________.

Suppose the functions F and G can be computed in 5 and 3 nanoseconds by functional units U_F and U_G, respectively. Given two instances of U_F and two instances of U_G, it is required to implement the computation F(G(X_i)) for 1 ≤ i ≤ 10. Ignoring all other delays, the minimum time required to complete this computation is _________ nanoseconds.

Consider a processor with 64 registers and an instruction set of size twelve. Each instruction has five distinct fields, namely, opcode, two source register identifiers, one destination register r identifier, and a twelve-bit immediate value. Each instruction must be stored in memory in a byte-aligned fashion. If a program has 100 instructions, the amount of memory (in bytes) consumed by the program text is _________.

The width of the physical address on a machine is 40 bits. The width of the tag field in a 512 KB 8-way set associative cache is _________ bits.

Consider a 3 GHz (gigahertz) processor with a three-stage pipeline and stage latencies τ₁, τ₂, τ₃ and such that τ₁  = 3τ₂/4 = 2τ₃. If the longest pipeline stage is split into two pipeline stages of equal latency, the new frequency is _________ GHz, ignoring delays in the pipeline registers.

A file system uses an in-memory cache to cache disk blocks. The miss rate of the cache is shown in the figure. The latency to read a block from the cache is 1 ms and to read a block from the disk is 10 ms. Assume that the cost of checking whether a block exists in the cache is negligible. Available cache sizes are in multiples of 10 MB.

The smallest cache size required to ensure an average read latency of less than 6 ms is _______ MB.

For computers based on three-address instruction formats, each address field can be used to specify which of the following:

(S1) A memory operand
(S2) A processor register
(S3) An implied accumulator register

Consider a disk pack with a seek time of 4 milliseconds and rotational speed of 10000 rotations per minute (RPM). It has 600 sectors per track and each sector can store 512 bytes of data. Consider a file stored in the disk. The file contains 2000 sectors. Assume that every sector access necessitates a seek, and the average rotational latency for accessing each sector is half of the time for one complete rotation. The total time (in milliseconds) needed to read the entire file is _________.

Consider the sequence of machine instruction given below

MUL R5,R0,R1 DIV R6,R2,R3 ADD R7,R5,R6 SUB R8,R7,R4 In the above sequence, R0 to R8 are general purpose registraters. In the instructions shown, the first register stores the result of the operation performed on the second and the third registers. This sequence of instructions is to be executed in a pipelined instruction processor with the following 4 stages: (1) Instruction Fetch and Decode (IF), (2) Operand Fetch (OF), (3) Perfom Operations (PO) and (4) Write back the result (WB). The IF, OF and WB stages take 1 clock cycle each instruction The PO stahe takes 1 clock cycle for ADD or SUB instruction, 3 clock cycles for MUL instruction and 5 clock cycles for DIV instructions. The pipelined processor uses operand foewarding from the PO stage to the OF stage. The number of clock cycles taken for the execution of the aboce sequence of instructions is _______

     Time -->
-----------------------------
      1    2   3    4     5
-----------------------------
S1  | X  |   |   |    |  X |    
S2  |    | X |   | X  |    |
S3  |    |   | X |    |    |

    OP Ri, Rj, Rk

   I1 : ADD R1, R2, R3
   I2 : MUL R7, R1, R3
   I3 : SUB R4, R1, R5
   I4 : ADD R3, R2, R4
   I5 : MUL R7, R8, R9

S1: There is an anti-dependence between instructions I2 and I5.
S2: There is an anti-dependence between instructions I2 and I4.
S3: Within an instruction pipeline an anti-dependence always 
    creates one or more stalls.

     MBR ← PC 
     MAR ← X  
     PC ← Y  
     Memory ← MBR

   c = a + b;
   d = c * a;
   e = c + a;
   x = c * c;
   if (x > a) {
      y = a * a;
   }
   else {
     d = d * d;
     e = e * e;
  }

. Interrupt from CPU temperature sensor (raises interrupt if 
  CPU temperature is too high)
. Interrupt from Mouse(raises interrupt if the mouse is moved 
  or a button is pressed)
. Interrupt from Keyboard(raises interrupt when a key is 
  pressed or released)
. Interrupt from Hard Disk(raises interrupt when a disk 
  read is completed)
Which one of these will be handled at the HIGHEST priority?

Initialize the address register
              Initialize the count to 500
        LOOP: Load a byte from device
              Store in memory at address given by address register
              Increment the address register
              Decrement the count
              If count != 0 go to LOOP

Assume that each statement in this program is equivalent to machine instruction which takes one clock cycle to execute if it is a non-load/store instruction. The load-store instructions take two clock cycles to execute. The designer of the system also has an alternate approach of using DMA controller to implement the same transfer. The DMA controller requires 20 clock cycles for initialization and other overheads. Each DMA transfer cycle takes two clock cycles to transfer one byte of data from the device to the memory. What is the approximate speedup when the DMA controller based design is used in place of the interrupt driven program based input-output?

     Instruction           Meaning of instruction
  I0 :MUL R2 ,R0 ,R1	      R2 ¬ R0 *R1
  I1 :DIV R5 ,R3 ,R4  	      R5 ¬ R3/R4
  I2 :ADD R2 ,R5 ,R2	      R2 ¬ R5+R2
  I3 :SUB R5 ,R2 ,R6	      R5 ¬ R2-R6

Assume that EA = (X)+ is the effective address equal to the contents of location X, with X incremented by one word length after the effective address is calculated; EA = −(X) is the effective address equal to the contents of location X, with X decremented by one word length before the effective address is calculated; EA = (X)− is the effective address equal to the contents of location X, with X decremented by one word length after the effective address is calculated. The format of the instruction is (opcode, source, destination), which means (destination ← source op destination). Using X as a stack pointer, which of the following instructions can pop the top two elements from the stack, perform the addition operation and push the result back to the stack.

Consider a CPU where all the instructions require 7 clock cycles to complete execution. There are 140 instructions in the instruction set. It is found that 125 control signals are needed to be generated by the control unit. While designing the horizontal microprogrammed control unit, single address field format is used for branch control logic. What is the minimum size of the control word and control address register?

A non pipelined single cycle processor operating at 100 MHz is converted into a synchro­nous pipelined processor with five stages requiring 2.5 nsec, 1.5 nsec, 2 nsec, 1.5 nsec and 2.5 nsec, respectively. The delay of the latches is 0.5 nsec. The speedup of the pipeline processor for a large number of instructions is

IF: Instruction Fetch
ID: Instruction Decode and Operand Fetch
EX: Execute
WB: Write Back

ADD R2, R1, R0       R2 <- R0 + R1
MUL R4, R3, R2       R4 <- R3 * R2
SUB R6, R5, R4       R6 <- R5 - R4

The floating point unit of a processor using a design D takes 2t cycles compared to t cycles taken by the fixed point unit. There are two more design suggestions D1 and D2. D1 uses 30% more cycles for fixed point unit but 30% less cycles for floating point unit as compared to design D. D2 uses 40% less cycles for fixed point unit but 10% more cycles for floating point unit as compared to design D. For a given program which has 80% fixed point operations and 20% floating point operations, which of the following ordering reflects the relative performances of three designs? (Di > Dj denotes that Di is faster than Dj)

Data forwarding techniques can be used to speed up the operation in presence of data dependencies. Consider the following replacements of LHS with RHS.

In which of the following options, will the result of executing the RHS be the same as executing the LHS irrespective of the instructions that follow ?