Computer Laboratory

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)

Supervision 4 - Caching and Multi-Processor Systems (Requires lectures 10-14)

  • Describe and explain
    1. Four different types of cache miss. [about 4 marks]
    2. Three different types of associativity. [about 3 marks]
    3. Four different cache-line replacement policies. [about 4 marks]
  • 2005 Paper 8 Question 1 (TLBs)
  • 2007 Paper 8 Question 3 (Forms of Parallelism)