COMPUTER ORGANIZATION AND 5th

Edition
The Hardware/Software Interface
DESIGN

Chapter 1
Computer Abstractions
and Technology
 §1.1 Introduction
The Computer Revolution
■ Progress in computer technology
■ Underpinned by Moore’s Law
■ Makes novel applications feasible
■ Computers in automobiles
■ Cell phones
■ Human genome project
■ World Wide Web
■ Search Engines
■ Computers are pervasive

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Classes of Computers
■ Personal computers
■ General purpose, variety of software
■ Subject to cost/performance tradeoff

■ Server computers
■ Network based
■ High capacity, performance, reliability
■ Range from small servers to building sized

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Classes of Computers
■ Supercomputers
■ High-end scientific and engineering
calculations
■ Highest capability but represent a small
fraction of the overall computer market

■ Embedded computers
■ Hidden as components of systems
■ Stringent power/performance/cost constraints

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The PostPC Era

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The PostPC Era
■ Personal Mobile Device (PMD)
■ Battery operated
■ Connects to the Internet
■ Hundreds of dollars
■ Smart phones, tablets, electronic glasses
■ Cloud computing
■ Warehouse Scale Computers (WSC)
■ Software as a Service (SaaS)
■ Portion of software run on a PMD and a
portion run in the Cloud
■ Amazon and Google
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What You Will Learn
■ How programs are translated into the
machine language
■ And how the hardware executes them
■ The hardware/software interface
■ What determines program performance
■ And how it can be improved
■ How hardware designers improve
performance
■ What is parallel processing

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Understanding Performance
■ Algorithm
■ Determines number of operations executed
■ Programming language, compiler, architecture
■ Determine number of machine instructions executed
per operation
■ Processor and memory system
■ Determine how fast instructions are executed
■ I/O system (including OS)
■ Determines how fast I/O operations are executed

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 §1.2 Eight Great Ideas in Computer Architecture
Eight Great Ideas
■ Design for Moore’s Law

■ Use abstraction to simplify design

■ Make the common case fast

■ Performance via parallelism

■ Performance via pipelining

■ Performance via prediction

■ Hierarchy of memories

■ Dependability via redundancy

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 §1.3 Below Your Program
Below Your Program
■ Application software
■ Written in high-level language
■ System software
■ Compiler: translates HLL code to
machine code
■ Operating System: service code
■ Handling input/output
■ Managing memory and storage
■ Scheduling tasks & sharing resources
■ Hardware
■ Processor, memory, I/O controllers

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Levels of Program Code
■ High-level language
■ Level of abstraction closer
to problem domain
■ Provides for productivity
and portability
■ Assembly language
■ Textual representation of
instructions
■ Hardware representation
■ Binary digits (bits)
■ Encoded instructions and
data

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 §1.4 Under the Covers
Components of a Computer
The BIG Picture ■ Same components for
all kinds of computer
■ Desktop, server,
embedded
■ Input/output includes
■ User-interface devices
■ Display, keyboard, mouse
■ Storage devices
■ Hard disk, CD/DVD, flash
■ Network adapters
■ For communicating with
other computers

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Abstractions
The BIG Picture

■ Abstraction helps us deal with complexity

■ Hide lower-level detail
■ Instruction set architecture (ISA)
■ The hardware/software interface
■ Application binary interface
■ The ISA plus system software interface
■ Implementation
■ The details underlying and interface

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 §1.6 Performance
Defining Performance
■ Which airplane has the best performance?

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Response Time and Throughput
■ Response time
■ How long it takes to do a task
■ Throughput
■ Total work done per unit time
■ e.g., tasks/transactions/… per hour
■ How are response time and throughput affected
by
■ Replacing the processor with a faster version?
■ Adding more processors?
■ We’ll focus on response time for now…

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Relative Performance
■ Define Performance = 1/Execution Time
■ “X is n time faster than Y”

■ Example: time taken to run a program

■ 10s on A, 15s on B
■ Execution TimeB / Execution TimeA
= 15s / 10s = 1.5
■ So A is 1.5 times faster than B
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Measuring Execution Time
■ Elapsed time
■ Total response time, including all aspects
■ Processing, I/O, OS overhead, idle time
■ Determines system performance
■ CPU time
■ Time spent processing a given job
■ Discounts I/O time, other jobs’ shares
■ Comprises user CPU time and system CPU
time
■ Different programs are affected differently by
CPU and system performance

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CPU Clocking
■ Operation of digital hardware governed by a
constant-rate clock
Clock period

Clock (cycles)

Data transfer
and computation
Update state

■ Clock period: duration of a clock cycle

■ e.g., 250ps = 0.25ns = 250×10–12s
■ Clock frequency (rate): cycles per second
■ e.g., 4.0GHz = 4000MHz = 4.0×109Hz
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CPU Time

■ Performance improved by
■ Reducing number of clock cycles
■ Increasing clock rate
■ Hardware designer must often trade off clock
rate against cycle count

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CPU Time Example
■ Computer A: 2GHz clock, 10s CPU time
■ Designing Computer B
■ Aim for 6s CPU time
■ Can do faster clock, but causes 1.2 × clock cycles
■ How fast must Computer B clock be?

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Instruction Count and CPI

■ Instruction Count for a program

■ Determined by program, ISA and compiler
■ Average cycles per instruction
■ Determined by CPU hardware
■ If different instructions have different CPI
■ Average CPI affected by instruction mix

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CPI Example
■ Computer A: Cycle Time = 250ps, CPI = 2.0
■ Computer B: Cycle Time = 500ps, CPI = 1.2
■ Same ISA
■ Which is faster, and by how much?

A is faster…

…by this much

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CPI in More Detail
■ If different instruction classes take different
numbers of cycles

■ Weighted average CPI

Relative frequency

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 CPI Example
■ Alternative compiled code sequences using
instructions in classes A, B, C
Class A B C
CPI for class 1 2 3
IC in sequence 1 2 1 2
IC in sequence 2 4 1 1

■ Sequence 1: IC = 5 ■ Sequence 2: IC = 6
■ Clock Cycles ■ Clock Cycles
= 2×1 + 1×2 + 2×3 = 4×1 + 1×2 + 1×3
= 10 =9
■ Avg. CPI = 10/5 = 2.0 ■ Avg. CPI = 9/6 = 1.5
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Performance Summary
The BIG Picture

■ Performance depends on
■ Algorithm: affects IC, possibly CPI
■ Programming language: affects IC, CPI
■ Compiler: affects IC, CPI
■ Instruction set architecture: affects IC, CPI, Tc

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 §1.10 Fallacies and Pitfalls
Pitfall: Amdahl’s Law
■ Improving an aspect of a computer and
expecting a proportional improvement in
overall performance

■ Example: multiply accounts for 80s/100s

■ How much improvement in multiply performance to
get 5× overall?
■ Can’t be done!

■ Corollary: make the common case fast

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Pitfall: MIPS as a Performance Metric
■ MIPS: Millions of Instructions Per Second
■ Doesn’t account for
■ Differences in ISAs between computers
■ Differences in complexity between instructions

■ CPI varies between programs on a given CPU

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 §1.9 Concluding Remarks
Concluding Remarks
■ Cost/performance is improving
■ Due to underlying technology development
■ Hierarchical layers of abstraction
■ In both hardware and software
■ Instruction set architecture
■ The hardware/software interface
■ Execution time: the best performance
measure
■ Power is a limiting factor
■ Use parallelism to improve performance

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