An application executes $6.4 \times 10^8$ number of instructions in 6.3 seconds. There are four types of instructions, the details of which are given in the table. The duration of a clock cycle in nanoseconds is _________. (rounded off to one decimal place)
Instruction type |
Clock cycles required per instruction (CPI) |
Number of Instructions executed |
---|---|---|
Branch | 2 | $2.25\times10^8$ |
Load | 5 | $1.20\times10^8$ |
Store | 4 | $1.65\times10^8$ |
Arithmetic | 3 | $1.30\times10^8$ |
A non-pipelined instruction execution unit operating at 2 GHz takes an average of 6 cycles to execute an instruction of a program P. The unit is then redesigned to operate on a 5-stage pipeline at 2 GHz. Assume that the ideal throughput of the pipelined unit is 1 instruction per cycle. In the execution of program P, 20% instructions incur an average of 2 cycles stall due to data hazards and 20% instructions incur an average of 3 cycles stall due to control hazards. The speedup (rounded off to one decimal place) obtained by the pipelined design over the non-pipelined design is ________
The baseline execution time of a program on a 2 GHz single core machine is 100 nanoseconds (ns). The code corresponding to 90% of the execution time can be fully parallelized. The overhead for using an additional core is 10 ns when running on a multicore system. Assume that all cores in the multicore system run their share of the parallelized code for an equal amount of time.
$$ \text { The number of cores that minimize the execution time of the program is _______. } $$A processor X1 operating at 2 GHz has a standard 5-stage RISC instruction pipeline having a base CPI (cycles per instruction) of one without any pipeline hazards. For a given program P that has 30% branch instructions, control hazards incur 2 cycles stall for every branch. A new version of the processor X2 operating at same clock frequency has an additional branch predictor unit (BPU) that completely eliminates stalls for correctly predicted branches. There is neither any savings nor any additional stalls for wrong predictions. There are no structural hazards and data hazards for X1 and X2. If the BPU has a prediction accuracy of 80%, the speed up (rounded off to two decimal places) obtained by X2 over X1 in executing P is ____________.