SLR 2 - Types of Processor

Question 1

What are the names of the two types of processor?

Answer 1

RISC and CISC.

Question 2

What is CISC?

State 3 Characteristics.

Answer 2

Complex Instruction set computer:
. Instructions take up less space in RAM
. More complex circuitry in decode unit
. Multiple clock cycles for one instruction
. smaller number of instructions need to be executed
. Instruction format is variable
. Larger number of addressing modes

Question 3

What is RISC?

State 3 Characteristics.

Answer 3

Reduced Instruction set computer:
. Less complex circuitry
. Uses more RAM
. each instruction takes one clock cycle to complete
. can pipeline
. more work for compilers

Question 4

What is CISC used in?

Answer 4

Laptops and Desktop Computers

Question 5

What is RISC used in?

Answer 5

Smartphones and Tablets

Question 6

What are GPUs?

Answer 6

Graphical Processing Unit, used for graphical rendering but are powerful co-processors that can run parallel tasks.

Question 7

What is SIMD?

Answer 7

SIMD - Single Instruction Multiple Data.

Question 8

What is MIMD?

Answer 8

MIMD allows GPU’s to process multiple instructions concurrently on different pieces of data.

Question 9

What does SIMD mean a GPU can do?

Answer 9

Allows a GPU to process multiple data elements simultaneously with a single instruction, enhancing parallelism.

Question 10

Name four uses of GPU’s.

Answer 10

. Modelling physical systems
. Scientific Simulations
. Audio Processing
. Cryptocurrency Mining
. Linear Algebra
. Machine Learning

Question 11

Exam Question: A 3D animator is animating a scene where a group of birds all need to fly upwards, why would a GPU rather than a CPU be more suited to processing this task?

Answer 11

.GPU uses SIMD
.Can apply the same animation instructions to all the objects simultaneously
.CPU would loop through each birds position and adjust it one by one
.SIMD applies the same movement to all birds at once
.Improves efficiency and performance.

Question 12

Why does having two cores not double the efficiency of the CPU?

Answer 12

Programs are rarely 100% parallelisable, meaning multiple cores will add little benefit, no matter how many you add.

Question 13

What is parallel processing?

Answer 13

The processing of a program by dividing them between multiple processors or processor cores.