1.1.2 - CISC & RISC, GPUs, Multicore and Parallel systems Flashcards
What are CISC and RISC examples of?
CPU architectures.
What does CISC stand for?
Complex Instruction Set Computers.
What does RISC stand for?
Reduced Instruction Set Computers.
What is CISC?
The design of the CPU with a larger (complex) instruction set, some of these instructions may take multiple cycles to complete low level operations.
What is an advantage of CISC?
The compiler has to do little work to translate a high level language statement into machine code because the code is short and little RAM is required to store the instructions.
What is a disadvantage of CISC?
Many specialised instructions have to be built into the hardware even though only about 20% of them are used in the average program.
What is RISC?
The design of the CPU with a smaller (reduced) instruction set, meaning there are more simple instructions that take one clock cycle to be executed.
What is an advantage of RISC?
Pipelining can be used which means multiple instructions can be completed in parallel.
What is a disadvantage of RISC?
The compiler has to translate high level code into more machine code than a CISC CPU.
What is a GPU?
(Graphics Processing Unit) A specialised electronic circuit with a massively parallel architecture consisting of thousands of smaller, more efficient cores designed for simultaneous tasks.
Where can you find the GPU on a normal computer?
On the graphics card or embedded on the motherboard.
What are some uses for GPUs?
Image-processing, machine learning and financial transactions.
What is the GPU a form of and what does this mean?
A co-processor, this means the GPU can be used with a CPU to offload some of the computer-intensive code onto the GPU while the rest of the code runs on the CPU, allowing for better performance.
What are multi-core CPUs able to do and what does this mean?
Distribute workload across multiple CPU cores meaning higher performance.
What is the improvement in performance from multi-core CPUs dependent on?
The software and OS being able to take advantage of the multiple cores.
