Date: 19-02-2018 Reg. No.

GRT INSTITUTE OF ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY

Tiruttani – 631 209
MODEL EXAM -1 EVEN SEMESTER 2018
Third Year/Sixth Semester
Electronics and Communication Engineering
CS6303 COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE (Regulation 2013)

Time: 3 Hours Maximum marks: 100

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Answer Key
PART-A (10 * 2=20 Marks)
1. List the eight great ideas invented by computer architects.
The eight great ideas in computer architecture are:

1. Design for Moore’s Law 2. Use Abstraction to Simplify Design 3. Make the Common Case Fast

4. Performance via Parallelism 5. Performance via Pipelining 6. Performance via Prediction 7. Hierarchy of
Memories 8. Dependability via Redundancy

2. What is instruction set architecture?

The instruction set architecture, or simply architecture of a computer is the interface between the
hardware and the lowest-level software. It includes anything programmers need to know to make
a binary machine language program work correctly, including instructions, I/O devices, and so on.

3. State the need for indirect addressing mode. Give example.

The effective address of the operand is the contents of a register or main memory location, location whose
address appears in the instruction. Indirection is noted by placing the name of the register or the memory
address given in the instruction in parentheses. The register or memory location that contains the address of
the operand is a pointer. When an execution takes place in such mode, instruction may be told to go to a
specific address. Once it's there, instead of finding an operand, it finds an address where the operand is
located.

4. State the representation of double precision floating point number?

The IEEE 754 standard specifies a binary64 as having:

Sign bit: 1 bit

Exponent: 11 bits

Significant precision: 53 bits (52 explicitly stored)

5. What is a guard bit and what are the ways to truncate the guard bit?
Guard bits are extra bits which are produced during the intermediate steps to yield
maximum accuracy in the final results.
1.Chopping

.Von Neumann rounding

.Rounding procedure
 6. What are R-type instructions?
Add r1, r2,r3 is the R – type instruction – the source operands and destination operand is registers.

7. What is a hazard? What are its types?

Hazard in a pipeline execution is the normal execution of pipeline stages may be suspended or stalled for
any reason.
a) Data hazard , b} structural hazard, c) control hazard.

8. What are the advantages of pipelining?

Pipelining process improves the performance of system by executing instruction in overlapped manner.
Through put increases.

9. What is meant by branch prediction?

Before executing the branch the branch may be predicted whether the branch will be taken or not taken.
Branch prediction is a method of resolving a branch hazard that assumes a given outcome for the branch
and proceeds from that assumption rather than waiting to ascertain the actual outcome.

10. What is a data path?

A data path element is a unit used to operate on or hold data within a processor. In the MIPS
implementation, the data path elements include the instruction and data memories, the register file,
the ALU, and adders.

PART B (5 * 13=65 Marks)

11 (a) What is an addressing mode? Explain the various addressing modes with suitable examples (13)
Addressing mode is the way of representing the location of the operand.
Various addressing modes:
1. Direct add mode
2. Indirect add mode
3. Immediate add mode
4. Register add mode
5. Register add mode
6. Register indirect add mode
7. Displacement add mode - 3 marks
Explanation of above addressing modes - 10 marks

(OR)
(b) Discuss about the various techniques to represent instructions in a computer system (13)
Representing the instruction :
Representing instruction in 32 bit format
Representing instruction in 64 bit format
One addressing
Two addressing
Three addressing
Zero addressing
Stack addressing - 3 marks
Explanation with example - 10 marks

12 (a) Multiply following pair of signed numbers using Booth’s bit pair recoding of multiplier. A = +13
(Multiplicand) And B = -6(Multiplier)
(13)
 Using above algorithm the problem will be solved . - 13 marks
(OR)
(b) (i) Design non restoring division with example. (7)
Algorithm for Non-restoring division is given in below image :
Flow chart with example problem - 13 marks

(ii)Explain how floating point addition is carry out in a computer system. Give an example for a binary
Floating point addition. (6)
 - 13 marks
13 (a) What is pipelining? Discuss about pipelined data path and control. (13)

A single-cycle datapath, which can be partitioned (subdivided) into functional units as shown in Figure 5.2. Because the single-
cycle datapath contains separate Instruction Memory and Data Memory units, this allows us to directly implement in hardware
the IF-ID-EX-MEM-WB representation of the MIPS instruction sequence. Observe that several control lines have been added,
for example, to route data from the ALU output (or memory output) to the register file for writing. Also, there are again three
ALUs, one for ALUop, another for JTA computation, and a third for adding PC+4 to compute the address of the next instruction.
  13 Marks
(OR)
(b) Briefly explain about various categories of hazards with examples (13)

There are situations, called hazards, that prevent the next instruction in the instruction stream from being executing during its
designated clock cycle. Hazards reduce the performance from the ideal speedup gained by pipelining.

There are three classes of hazards:

Structural Hazards. They arise from resource conflicts when the hardware cannot support all possible combinations
of instructions in simultaneous overlapped execution.
Data Hazards. They arise when an instruction depends on the result of a previous instruction in a way that is
exposed by the overlapping of instructions in the pipeline.
Control Hazards.They arise from the pipelining of branches and other instructions that change the PC.
4 marks
Explanation on above 9 marks

14. (a) Explain the basic MIPS implementation with necessary multiplexers and control line. (13)
Explanation and diagram - 13 marks

(OR)
(b)Describe operand formatting in a pipeline processor with a diagram. (13)
MIPS pipelined processor diagram - 5 marks
Explanation with operands - 8 marks

15. (a) Explain in detail how exceptions are handled in MIPS architecture? (13)

Introduction

In this unit, you will learn how to add interrupt and exception support to your multicycle CPU design. For additional
information, please refer section 5.6 and appendix A in the Hennessy and Patterson textbook. Note: you will only be
implementing a subset of the exception and interrupt functionality of the MIPS architecture. Therefore, use this page as your
definitive source of information regarding this unit.

Exceptions and Interrupts defined

Exceptions and interrupts are unexpected events that disrupt the normal flow of instruction execution. An exception is an
unexpected event from within the processor. An interrupt is an unexpected event from outside the processor. You are to
implement exception and interrupt handling in your multicycle CPU design.

When an exception or interrupt occurs, the hardware begins executing code that performs an action in response to the exception.
This action may involve killing a process, outputting a error message, communicating with an external device, or horribly
crashing the entire computer system by initiating a "Blue Screen of Death" and halting the CPU. The instructions responsible for
this action reside in the operating system kernel, and the code that performs this action is called the interrupt handler code. You
can think of handler code as an operating system subroutine. After the handler code is executed, it may be possible to continue
execution after the instruction where the execution or interrupt occurred.
Exceptions: Types

For your project, there are three events that will trigger an exception: arithmetic overflow, undefined instruction, and system call.

Arithmetic overflow occurs during the execution of an add, addi, or sub instruction. If the result of the computation is too large
or too small to hold in the result register, the Overflow output of the ALU will become high during the execute state. This event
triggers an exception.

Undefined instruction occurs when an unknown instruction is fetched. This exception is caused by an instruction in the IR that
has an unknown opcode or an R-type instruction that has an unknown function code.

System call occurs when the processor executes a syscall instruction. Syscall instructions are used to implement operating
system services (functions). - 6 marks

Handling exceptions - 7 marlks

(OR)
(b)Explain data path and its control in detail. (13)
Data path in MIPS architecture diagram - 6 marks
Explanations about data path - 7 marks

PART C (1 * 15=15 Marks)

16). a) Perform addition and subtraction of single precision floating point numbers A and B , Where A=44900000H and
B=42A00000H. (15)

1 bit = sign bit(s).

8 = Biased exponent bits (e)

23 = mantissa (m).

Fig 1: IEEE 754 Floating point standard floating point word

The Decimal value of a normalized floating point numbers in IEEE 754 standard is represented as

- 4 marks

Example problem solving - 9 marks

(OR)

b). Explain in detail about the multiplication algorithm with suitable example and diagram. (15)
binary multiplication algorithm with flow chart - 9 marks
Example problem - 6 marks

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