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 five-stage pipeline has stage delays of 150, 120, 150, 160 and 140 nanoseconds. The registers that are used between the pipeline stages have a delay of 5 nanoseconds each.

The total time to execute 100 independent instructions on this pipeline, assuming there are no pipeline stalls, is ______ nanoseconds.

Consider the following instruction sequence where register R1, R2 and R3 are general purpose and MEMORY[X] denotes the content at the memory location X.

Instruction	Semantics	Instruction Size (bytes)
MOV R1, (5000)	R1 ← MEMORY[5000]	4
MOV R2, (R3)	R2 ← MEMORY[R3]	4
ADD R2, R1	R2 ← R1 + R2	2
MOV (R3), R2	MEMORY[R3] ← R2	4
INC R3	R3 ← R3 + 1	2
DEC R1	R1 ← R1 – 1	2
BNZ 1004	Branch if not zero to the given absolute address	2
HALT	Stop	1

 

Assume that the content of the memory location 5000 is 10, and the content of the register R3 is 3000. The content of each of the memory locations from 3000 to 3010 is 50. The instruction sequence starts from the memory location 1000. All the numbers are in decimal format. Assume that the memory is byte addressable.

After the execution of the program, the content of memory location 3010 is ______

Consider a non-pipelined processor operating at 2.5 GHz. It takes 5 clock cycles to complete an instruction. You are going to make a 5-stage pipeline out of this processor. Overheads associated with pipelining force you to operate the pipelined processor at 2 GHz. In a given program, assume that 30% are memory instructions, 60% are ALU instructions and the rest are branch instructions. 5% of the memory instructions cause stalls of 50 clock cycles each due to cache misses and 50% of the branch instructions cause stalls of 2 cycles each. Assume that there are no stalls associated with the execution of ALU instructions. For this program, the speedup achieved by the pipelined processor over the non-pipelined processor (round off to 2 decimal places) is _____.