5
Number of general purpose registers → ISA (we need to know what we have access to)
Number of read ports in the physical register file → UARCH
Size of a virtual memory page → ISA
- maybe software page table walker
- OS must know how to build page tables that the hardware can walk!
6
a)
The software interlocking machine has internal register file forwarding, but we still need to stall 2 cycles.
This is because W→ID is possible, but not W→EX without data forwarding
- W→EX works only because there is an extra wire with which the data from W overwrites the registers between ID/EX.
- ID is where the values actually get read.
8 GPU
d)
Cursed ah analytical expression
9. Branch Prediction
1.
I completely forgot B1 for every single question here.
11. Prefetching
a)
It can go faster as well if the prefetch requests from the dropped instructions were worse.