Ian Davies
Comparative Architectures Supervisions
I am expecting this course to require about 4 supervisions, to be held fortnightly on Friday, Monday or Tuesday afternoons starting January 25th, 28th or 29th.
Supervision Work
To be handed in at least 24 hours in advance. Use the post-box next to Student Administration in the William Gates Building or, preferably, email your work to me in any sensible format.
Supervision 1 - Instruction Set Architectures (Requires lectures 1-3)
- What is the difference between RISC and CISC? What are the pros and cons of each? [about 4 marks]
- What are register windows? [about 4 marks]
- Give examples of several addressing modes and how they would be used. [about 4 marks]
- Describe and explain the decisions that must be taken when designing an Instruction Set Architecture, and the options that are available. Include pros and cons for each and give examples. [about 20 marks]
- 2005 Paper 7 Question 1 (ISA Comparison)
Supervision 2 - Pipelining (Requires lectures 4-5)
- Describe and explain the stages of the classic RISC pipeline. [about 10 marks]
- What are data hazards? [about 6 marks]
- What are control hazards? [about 4 marks]
- What are structural hazards? [about 2 marks]
- 2007 Paper 7 Question 1 (Branch Prediction)
- 1997 Paper 8 Question 4 (Control-Flow Hazards)
Supervision 3 - Super-Scalar Techniques (Requires lectures 6-9)
- Discuss static vs dynamic instruction scheduling. [about 10 marks]
- 2003 Paper 7 Question 1 (Instruction-Level Parallelism)
- 1999 Paper 7 Question 3 (Dynamic Execution)
Supervision 4 - Caching and Multi-Processor Systems (Requires lectures 10-14)
- Describe and explain
- Four different types of cache miss. [about 4 marks]
- Three different types of associativity. [about 3 marks]
- Four different cache-line replacement policies. [about 4 marks]
- 2005 Paper 8 Question 1 (TLBs)
- 2007 Paper 8 Question 3 (Forms of Parallelism)