EE 502 - Advanced Computer Architecture

Assignment No. 1

Due Date: Thursday, September 4th by 11.59pm.

Assignments are to be done individually. No late assignments will be accepted. Submit your assignment by
11:59pm on the day that it is due.

Submissions that do not comply with the specifications given in this document will not be marked
and a zero grade will be assigned.

You are to hand in at the start of class on the due date a report typeset in LATEX with your name and email
address on the front sheet. Also write your name and email id in a comment line in on top of each source file.
You are to submit a single zip file containing an archive of your documentation and source program on SLATE
and PIAZZA Classroom.

Fundamentals of Quantitative Design and Analysis

1 Questions
1. Your company’s internal studies show that a single-core system is sufficient for the demand
on your processing power; however, you are exploring whether you could save power by using
two cores.

a. Assume your application is 80% parallelizable. By how much could you decrease the frequency and
get the same performance?

b. Assume that the voltage may be decreased linearly with the frequency. How much dynamic power
would the dual-core system require as compared to the single-core system?

c. Now assume the voltage may not decrease below 25% of the original voltage. This voltage is referred to
as the voltage floor, and any voltage lower than that will lose the state. What percent of parallelization
gives you a voltage at the voltage floor?

d. How much dynamic power would the dual-core system require as compared to the single-core sys-
tem when taking into account the voltage floor?

2. Your company is trying to choose between purchasing the Opteron or Itanium 2. You have
analyzed your company’s applications, and 60% of the time it will be running applications
similar to wupwise, 20% of the time applications similar to ammp, and 20% of the time
applications similar to apsi.

a. If you were choosing just based on overall SPEC performance, which would you choose and why?

b. What is the weighted average of execution time ratios for this mix of applications for the Opteron

1
 and Itanium 2?

c. What is the speedup of the Opteron over the Itanium 2?

3. They will sell a range of chips from that factory, and they need to decide how much capacity
to dedicate to each chip. Imagine that they will sell two chips. Phoenix is a completely
new architecture designed with 7 nm technology in mind, whereas RedDragon is the same
architecture as their 10 nm BlueDragon. Imagine that RedDragon will make a profit of $15
per defect-free chip. Phoenix will make a profit of $30 per defect-free chip. Each wafer has
a 450 mm diameter.

a. How much profit do you make on each wafer of Phoenix chips?

b. How much profit do you make on each wafer of RedDragon chips?
c. If your demand is 50,000 RedDragon chips per month and 25,000 Phoenix chips per month, and your
facility can fabricate 70 wafers a month, how many wafers should you make of each chip?
4. You have a system that contains a special processor for doing floating-point operations.You
have determined that 50% of your computations can use the floating-point processor. The
speedup of the floating pointing-point processor is 15. What is the overall speedup achieved
by using the floating-point processor.

2 Submission Instructions
You will submit a paper copy of the formal assignment report in class (3-5 pages[more pages will lose marks],
You are also expected to submit your report on PIAZZA/Classroom before the deadline.