Computer Organization

Final Exam

• Assembly language
  • Assembly language vs. high-level languages
  • Instructions: add, addi, sub, lw, sw, beq, bne, j
  • How to translate simple C code into assembly
    • Simple expressions
    • If and if-else statements
  • Instruction formats
  • Calling and returning from functions
  • Passing parameters/return values to/from functions
• Computer Arithmetic
  • Representation of unsigned integers
  • Two's complement representation of signed integers
  • IEEE floating point format and number types
  • Operations on infinites and NaNs
• Performance
  • Relationship between execution time and performance
  • Execution time equation
  • Static vs. dynamic instruction count
  • Definition of CPI
  • How to compare processor performance
  • Amdahl's law
• Datapath and Control
  • Single-cycle vs. multicycle vs. pipelining
  • How to compute clock cycle time for each implementation
  • How to compute CPI for each implementation
  • How to compare performance between implementations
  • Hazards
  • Forwarding
  • Stalls
  • Branch prediction
• Caches and Memory Hierarchy
  • Temporal and spatial locality
  • Memory hierarchy
  • Cache
  • Types of cache: direct-mapped, set associative, fully associative
  • Demonstrate operation of a direct-mapped cache
  • Causes of cache misses
  • Hit time, miss rate, and miss penalty
  • How associativity effects hit time and miss rate
  • How block size effects miss rate
  • Write-through vs. write-back
  • Compute CPI with memory stalls
  • How processor clock rate effects miss penalty
  • Multiple levels of cache and effect on performance
• Virtual Memory
  • Address translation
  • Page faults
  • Page table and page table register
  • Translation-lookaside buffer (TLB)
  • TLB miss vs. page fault
  • Physically-addressed cache vs. virtually-addressed cache