Assignment #2

Computer Organization
DE-44

Question 1:
Consider an application which spends 75% of the time on the GPU whereas rest of the time is spent doing
I/O operations.

a. How much improvement will be required in the GPU’s performance if an overall speedup of 3.5
times is required by the complete system
b. Can we improve performance by a factor of 4 or more? Justify your answer.

Question 2:
Consider a computer having processor A running a program which requires 10 seconds to complete. The
processor A is replaced by another processor B having 15% better frequency though requiring 10% more
number of instructions and each instruction requires 10% more cycles to complete. The marketing team
for processor B claims better performance based on MIPS.

Your aim is to assess this claim and justify whether processor B is faster than processor A or not.

Question 3:
Keeping in view the power/performance chart, comment
on how power only increased from 3.3 to 103 watts
whereas the frequency has increased from 12.5 to 3600
MHz (from 80286 till Pentium 4 series). (Base your
answer on the power expression.)

Exercise Questions (Edition 5: Computer Organization and Design-Patterson and Hennessy):

1.8
1.11
1.12