1.
Which of the following are NOT true in a pipelined processor?
I. Bypassing can handle all RAW hazards.
II. Register renaming can eliminate all register carried WAR hazards.
III. Control hazard penalties can be eliminated by dynamic branch prediction.
2.
In an instruction execution pipeline, the earliest that the data TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer) can be accessed is
3.
Consider a pipelined processor with the following four stages:
IF: Instruction Fetch
ID: Instruction Decode and Operand Fetch
EX: Execute
WB: Write Back
The IF, ID and WB stages take one clock cycle each to complete the operation. The number of clock cycles for the EX stage dependson the instruction. The ADD and SUB instructions need 1 clock cycle and the MUL instruction needs 3 clock cycles in the EX stage. Operand forwarding is used in the pipelined processor. What is the number of clock cycles taken to complete the following sequence of instructions?
ADD R2, R1, R0 R2 <- R0 + R1
MUL R4, R3, R2 R4 <- R3 * R2
SUB R6, R5, R4 R6 <- R5 - R4
4.
Consider the data given in above question. Assume that the memory is word addressable. After the execution of this program, the content of memory location 2010 is:
5.
Consider the data given in above questions. Assume that the memory is byte addressable and the word size is 32 bits. If an interrupt occurs during the execution of the instruction “INC R3”, what return address will be pushed on to the stack?
6.
Consider a 6-stage instruction pipeline, where all stages are perfectly balanced.Assume that there is no cycle-time overhead of pipelining. When an application is executing on this 6-stage pipeline, the speedup achieved with respect to non-pipelined execution if 25% of the instructions incur 2 pipeline stall cycles is
7.
Consider the following processors (ns stands for nanoseconds). Assume that the pipeline registers have zero latency.
P1: Four-stage pipeline with stage latencies 1 ns, 2 ns, 2 ns, 1 ns.
P2: Four-stage pipeline with stage latencies 1 ns, 1.5 ns, 1.5 ns, 1.5 ns.
P3: Five-stage pipeline with stage latencies 0.5 ns, 1 ns, 1 ns, 0.6 ns, 1 ns.
P4: Five-stage pipeline with stage latencies 0.5 ns, 0.5 ns, 1 ns, 1 ns, 1.1 ns.
Which processor has the highest peak clock frequency?
8.
An instruction pipeline has five stages, namely, instruction fetch (IF), instruction decode and register fetch (ID/RF), instruction execution (EX), memory access (MEM), and register writeback (WB) with stage latencies 1 ns, 2.2 ns, 2 ns, 1 ns, and 0.75 ns, respectively (ns stands for nanoseconds). To gain in terms of frequency, the designers have decided to split the ID/RF stage into three stages (ID, RF1, RF2) each of latency 2.2/3 ns. Also, the EX stage is split into two stages (EX1, EX2) each of latency 1 ns. The new design has a total of eight pipeline stages. A program has 20% branch instructions which execute in the EX stage and produce the next instruction pointer at the end of the EX stage in the old design and at the end of the EX2 stage in the new design. The IF stage stalls after fetching a branch instruction until the next instruction pointer is computed. All instructions other than the branch instruction have an average CPI of one in both the designs. The execution times of this program on the old and the new design are P and Q nanoseconds, respectively. The value of P/Q is __________.
9.
A CPU has a five-stage pipeline and runs at 1 GHz frequency. Instruction fetch happens in the first stage of the pipeline. A conditional branch instruction computes the target address and evaluates the condition in the third stage of the pipeline. The processor stops fetching new instructions following a conditional branch until the branch outcome is known. A program executes 109 instructions out of which 20% are conditional branches. If each instruction takes one cycle to complete on average, the total execution time of the program is:
10.
Consider a three word machine instruction
ADD A[R0], @ B 
The first operand (destination) "A [R0]" uses indexed addressing mode with R0 as the index register. The second operand (source) "@ B" uses indirect addressing mode. A and B are memory addresses residing at the second and the third words, respectively. The first word of the instruction specifies the opcode, the index register designation and the source and destination addressing modes. During execution of ADD instruction, the two operands are added and stored in the destination (first operand). The number of memory cycles needed during the execution cycle of the instruction is