Assignment 1
Computer Science 240
Fall 2008
Due: Monday, September 15
Reading. Patterson & Hennessy Chapter 1, §2.1 – §2.4, §A9, §A10
1.1 The first chapter of Patterson and Hennessy lays the foundation for the rest of the
book. It introduces the basic ideas and definitions, places the major components of
software and hardware in perspective, and introduces integrated circuits. As the authors
point out in their introduction, there is a lot of special terminology and an alphabet soup
of acronyms. Patterson and Hennessy exercises 1.1 – 1.28 and exercises 1.29 – 1.45 will
help you learn this new terminology so that we can use it throughout the semester. All
terms are defined in the first chapter of the text.
1.2. At a certain point in time, a transistor on a microprocessor was 1 micron in
diameter. According to Moore’s law, how big would a transistor be on next year’s
model?
1.3. On computer 1, all instructions take 10 nsec to execute. On computer 2, they all
take 5 nsec to execute. Can you say for certain that computer 2 is faster? Discuss briefly.
1.4. Genetic information is all living things is coded as DNA molecules. A DNA
molecule is a linear sequence of the four basic nucleotides: A, C, G, and T. The human
genome contains approximately 3×109 nucleotides in the form of about 100,000 genes.
What is the total information capacity (in bits) of the human genome? What is the
information capacity (in bits) of the average gene?
1.5. Convert the following numbers to binary: 1984, 4000, 8192.
1.6. What is 1001101001 (binary) in decimal? In octal? In hexadecimal?
1.7. How many different positive integers can be expressed in k digits using radix r?
1.8. Describe the characteristics of RISC machines. Describe the characteristics of CISC
machines. Is MIPS a RISC or CISC architecture? Why?
1.9. Using hex notation indicate the address of each register and its contents, diagram
memory as a sequence of bytes after the following sequence of assembler directives have
executed. Indicate the label, if there is one, next to each memory address. Assume that the
data section starts at address 0x00000000 and that memory grows backwards into higher
locations. Take care; there is an endian issue here. Specify whether the byte order is big
endian or little endian.
.data
