PART A
Answer the following questions:
1. Briefly explain any two breakthroughs in the history of computing. [5 marks]
2. Identify the following statements True/False. [5 marks]
a. The Principle of Equivalence of Hardware and Software supports the claim that it is not possible to build a special purpose computer to perform only word processing.
b. The turning points in the historical development of computers are based on the technology incorporated into the devices.
c. One million bytes can be represented as 1000K bytes.
d. The Principle of Equivalence of Hardware and Software says that hardware and software are basically equivalent, and implementations done via either method will run at the same speeds.
e. A Hertz is one million cycles per second.
f. Manufacturers use standards so they can market their products to a wider audience than if they came up with separate – and perhaps incompatible – specifications.
g. If Moore’s Law is to hold, Rock’s Law must fall.
h. Amdahl's Law states that the performance enhancement possible with a given improvement is limited by the amount
that the improved feature is used.
i. Moore's Law states that the density of silicon chips is cut in half every 18 months.
j. A CPU typically contains a control unit, an arithmetic logic unit, registers, and a program counter.
3. Show how the floating point value 0.75 would be stored using IEEE-754 single precision (be sure to indicate the sign bit, the exponent, and the significant fields) [4 marks]
4. Represent the following decimal numbers in binary using 8-bit signed magnitude, one's complement and two's complement: [6 marks]
a. 119
b. -107
5. Using the basic identities of Boolean algebra, show that: xy + x'z + yz = xy + x' z. [4 marks]
6. Little Susie is trying to train her new puppy. She is trying to figure out when the puppy should get a dog biscuit as a reward. She has concluded the following:
a. Give the puppy a biscuit if it sits and wiggles but does not bark.
b. Give the puppy a biscuit if it barks and wiggles but does not sit.
c. Give the puppy a biscuit if it sits but does not wiggle or bark.
d. Give the puppy a biscuit if it sits, wiggles and barks.
e. Don’t give the puppy a treat otherwise.
Use the following:
S: Sit (0 for not sitting; 1 for sitting)
W: Wiggles (0 for not wiggling; 1 for wiggling)
B: Barking (0 for not barking; 1 for barking)
F: Biscuit function (0, don’t give the puppy a biscuit; 1, give the puppy a biscuit)
Construct a truth table and find the minimized Boolean function to implement the logic telling Susie when to give her dog a biscuit. [6 marks]
Online submission via Turnitin is required for this assignment.
Rationale
This assessment task covers topic 1 to topic 3, and has been designed to ensure that you are engaging with the subject content on a regular basis. More specifically it seeks to assess your ability to:
• be able to define and appropriately use computer systems terminologies;
• be able to describe the concepts of data representations and use appropriate methods of implementation;
• be able to apply Boolean algebra and digital logic to design and interpret digital circuits.
Part B
Answer the following questions:
1. Suppose that a 16M × 16 memory built using 512K × 8 RAM chips and memory is word-addressable. [5 marks]
a. How many RAM chips are necessary?
b. How many RAM chips are there per memory word?
c. How many address bits are needed for each RAM chip?
d. How many banks will this memory have?
e. How many address bits are needed for all of memory?
2. Consider the MARIE program below.
a. List the hexadecimal code for each instruction. [5 marks]
b. Draw the symbol table. [3 marks]
c. What is the value stored in the AC when the program terminates? [2 marks]
Hex
Addr Label Instruction
100 Start, LOAD A
101 ADD B
102 STORE D
103 CLEAR
104 OUTPUT
105 ADDI D
106 STORE B
107 HALT
108 A, HEX 00FC
109 B, DEC 14
10A C, HEX 0108
10B D, HEX 0000
3. Write code to implement the expression
F = (A+B) *(C+D+E) on 2-, 1- and 0-address machines. [5 marks]
4. What are the advantages and disadvantages of having a small number of sectors per disk cluster? (Hint: You may want to think about retrieval time and the required lifetime of the archives.) [3 marks]
5. Suppose a word-addressable computer using set associative cache has 216 words of main memory and a cache of 32 blocks, and each cache block contains 8 words. [4 marks]
a. If this cache is 2-way set associative, what is the format of a memory address as seen by the cache, that is, what are the sizes of the tag, set, and offset fields?
b. If this cache is 4-way set associative, what is the format of a memory address as seen by the cache?
6. Describe in your own words the difference between the role of a system analyst and the role of a program analyst. [4 marks]
7. Suppose a disk drive has the following characteristics: [6 marks]
• 5 surfaces
• 1024 tracks per surface
• 256 sectors per track
• 512 bytes/sector
• Track-to-track seek time of 8 milliseconds
• Rotational speed of 7500 RPM.
a. What is the capacity of the drive?
b. What is the access time?
8. Suppose a process page table contains the entries shown below. Using the format shown in Table, indicate where the process pages are located in memory. [3 marks]
Page Frame Valid Bit
0 -- 0
1 3 1
2 -- 0
3 -- 0
4 2 1
5 0 1
6 -- 0
7 1 1
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