2007 Paper 8 Question 3
Comparative Architectures
(a) Why is multi-processing more important than ever? [3 marks]
(b) Name the two basic forms of parallelism that are exploited by all new
high-performance processors. [2 marks]
(c) Which form(s) of parallelism is/are exploited by the following four styles
of multi-processing: multi-core processors, coarse and fine interleaved
multi-threading, and simultaneous multi-threading? Explain these terms and
say how good each is at hiding memory latency. [6 marks]
(d) How does compiler and operating system support need to differ for each form
and style? [4 marks]
(e) Thinking of the complete flow from high-level language design through to
hardware execution, what tends to limit the available parallelism in a single
thread? Suggest various ways of increasing it. [5 marks]