• Factors Affecting Performance ( 2 )

Question 1

What is pipelining?

Answer 1

Technique used to improve performance, through overlapping stages in the fetch execute cycle/breaking down stages in an arithmetic instruction.

Question 2

How does the processor read words?

Answer 2

• When the processor need to read a word of data from memory, it puts the address of the desired word on the address bus.

Question 3

How does the processor read words?

Answer 3

• When the processor need to read a word of data from memory, it puts the address of the desired word on the address bus.

Question 4

What determines the maximum possible memory capacity of the system?

Answer 4

Width of the address bus.

Question 5

What determines the largest operand that can be held in a word?

Answer 5

• The size of the data bus.
E.g. If the data bus 16 bits wide, a word cannot hold an integer greater than (2^16)-1
• Larger data bus can transmit larger values, or more characters at a time, or allow more bits per instruction.