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CS2253 COMPUTER ORGANIZATION AND ARCHITECTUREquestion bank

UNIT 3

PIPELINING

PART A

1. What is pipelining?2. What are the major characteristics of a pipeline?3. What is a pipeline hazard?4. What is data hazard?5. What is instruction or control hazard?6. Define structural hazards.

7. What is side effect?8. What do you mean by branch penalty?9. What is branch folding?10. What do you mean by delayed branching?11. What are the two types of branch prediction techniques available?12. What is the ideal speedup expected in a pipelined architecture with n stages. Justifyyour answer.13. Draw the structure of two stage instruction pipeline.14. What is RAW hazard?15. What is WAW hazard?16. What is the use of branch prediction technique?

17. What is the use of pipelining?18. What are the characteristics of the MIPS Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) that facilitatepipelined execution?

PART B

1. Discuss the various hazards that might arise in a pipeline. What are the remediescommonly adopted to overcome/minimize these hazards. (16)2. Explain in detail about instruction execution characteristics. (16)

3. Explain the function of a six segment pipeline showing the time it takes to processeight tasks. (10)4. Highlight the solutions of instruction hazards. (6)5. Define the terms "structural hazard", "control hazard", and "data hazard" in the contextof pipelines. Which of these hazards is addressed by a hardware branch predictor (whichguesses whether a branch will be taken or not)? For one of the other hazards, suggest away, either in software or hardware, the effect of that hazard could be reduced.6. The five stages of the simple MIPS pipeline we covered in class are: instruction fetch,

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instruction decode and register read, execute or calculate address, memory access, andregister write. Describe the purpose of each of these stages.

7. Define the terms "structural hazard", "control hazard", and "data hazard" in the context

of pipelines. Which of these hazards is addressed by a hardware branch predictor (whichguesses whether a branch will be taken or not)? For one of the other hazards, suggest away, either in software or hardware, the effect of that hazard could be reduced.

8. Define the terms "spatial locality" and "temporal locality", and explain how caches areused to exploit them for a performance benefit. Be specific in the different ways thatcaches exploit these two phenomena.