11) Circuit Imple- mentation Exercises

A. Comprehension

1. Answer these questions:

1. How can the term «computer architecture» be determined?

2. What abstraction layers is it usually divided into?

3. How many subcategories does computer architecture comprise? What are they? Characterize each one.

4. What is the name for the process of designing the actual device into hardware? Describe each piece of it.

5. What criteria are fundamental for the exact form of a computer system?

6. How can computer performance be measured?

7. What factor has increased power efficiency in importance?

2. Match the beginning of each sentence from the left column with the rest part of it in the right column.

2) Macroarchitec- ture

1) Instruction set architecture

1. is transistor-level design of basic elements (gates, multiplexers, latches, etc.) as well as of some larger blocks (ALUs, caches, etc.) that may be implement- ed at this level, or even (partly) at the physical level, for performance reasons

2. design of blocks defined in the microarchitecture at (primarily) the register-transfer and gate levels

3) Microarchitec- c) is the process when physical circuits are drawn ture out, the different circuit components are placed in a

chip floor-plan or on a board and the wires connect- ing them are routed

4) Assembly ISA d) is the time between the start of a process and its

completion

5) Microcode e) is the amount of work done per unit time. Inter- Instruction Set nipt latency is the guaranteed maximum response Architecture time of the system to an electronic event (e.g. when

the disk drive finishes moving some data)

6) Pin Architecture 0 is the set of functions that a microprocessor is expected to provide, from the point of view of a hardware platform

7) Computer archi tecture

g) is a family of machines with different hardware level microarchitectures that may share a common microcode architecture, and hence a MISA

8) Physical Imple- mentation

h) is architectural layers that are more abstract than microarchitecture, e.g. ISA

9) Latency

i) is a smart assembler may convert an abstract assembly language common to a group of machines into slightly different machine language for different implementations

10) Programmer Visible Macroarchi tecture

j) is higher level language tools such as compil- ers may define a consistent interface or contract to programmers using them, abstracting differences between underlying ISA, UISA, and microarchitec- tures

k) is the abstract image of a computing system that is seen by a machine language (or assembly lan- guage) programmer, including the instruction set, memory address modes, processor registers, and address and data formats

12) Throughput 1) is a blueprint and functional description of re-

quirements (especially speeds and interconnections) and design implementations for the various parts of a computer — focusing largely on the way by which the central processing unit (CPU) performs inter- nally and accesses addresses in memory

13) Performance m) is affected by a very wide range of design

choices — for example, pipelining a processor usually makes latency worse (slower) but makes throughput better

14) Logic Imple- n) is a lower level, more concrete and detailed, mentation description of the system that involves how the con-

stituent parts of the system are interconnected and how they intemperate in order to implement the ISA