Al Akhawayn University

School of Sciences & Engineering

CSC2304 Fall10
Homework 2
Deadline
You should submit your work online later than October, Sunday 24 midnight.
Make sure your attachments are not empty and not corrupted. Your attachments should have the
following format:
<teamMembersSeparatedBy”_”>.CSC2304.hmk<Number>.zip
Late assignment policy -10% for every day delay.
Any kind of similarity will result in an automatic zero.
Failure to abide by the rules above might lower your grade.

Exercise 1 (20 pts)

Consider the devices below, discuss the pros and cons of each of the I/O techniques (polling,
interrupts, DMA), and suggest which one would be the most appropriate for every I/O device.
1. Keyboard
2. Screen
3. DVD drive
N.B. need to do reading about DMA.

Exercise 2 (20 pts)

The Von Neumann architecture doesn’t support read and write to I/O. suggest organizational and
architectural modifications to support these instructions.

Research Exercise (60 pts)

Write a 5 page paper (single space) about PCI express, the following points should be covered:
o Introduction: What is PCI Express? How does it relate/differ to PCI?
o PCI Express architecture overview.
o Bus traffic organization.
o Performance Characteristics.
o Examples of existing implementations from vendors.
o Summary and Conclusion
o References