1.8

Question 1

What’s the main difference between a core and a thread?

Answer 1

A core is an actual hardware component whereas a thread is a virtual component that manages the tasks.

Question 2

True or False?
From the mid-1980s to early-2000s, processor performance improved each year at an average of 52%.

Answer 2

True
Growth in processor performance was attributed to architectural and organizational improvements.

Question 3

True or False?
Growth in processor performance slowed in 2002.

Answer 3

True
Since 2002, processor performance growth has slowed from 52% to 3.5% per year.

Question 4

True or False?
Power was a factor in the slowing of processor performance growth.

Answer 4

True
As power continued to grow, cooling became a significant problem. Limitations to instruction-level parallelism and memory latency have also slowed processor performance growth.

Question 5

True or False?
Manufacturers continue to design single processor systems and increase processor performance through new technology-driven improvements.

Answer 5

False
Manufacturers have turned to multicore designs to improve system performance.

Question 6

True or False?
Parallel programming becomes more difficult as the number of processor cores increases.

Answer 6

True
Scheduling and communication overhead increases with the number of sub-tasks, making parallel programming more difficult to accomplish and diminishing improvements obtained from parallelism.

Question 7

How should programmers write code to maximize the benefits of parallel programming?

Answer 7

Divide a program into subtasks so all processors run about the same amount of time