Practice Impact on Performance - 4.2.3 | 4. Branches and Limits to Pipelining | Computer Architecture
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Impact on Performance

4.2.3 - Impact on Performance

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Practice Questions

Test your understanding with targeted questions

Question 1 Easy

What is a control hazard?

💡 Hint: Think about waiting times in decision-making.

Question 2 Easy

What can cause a branch decision delay?

💡 Hint: Consider situations where a choice has to be made.

4 more questions available

Interactive Quizzes

Quick quizzes to reinforce your learning

Question 1

What is a control hazard?

A dependency between data
A situation that delays instruction fetching
An execution error

💡 Hint: It has to do with branches, not data.

Question 2

True or False: Control hazards can be reduced by increasing a processor's pipeline depth.

True
False

💡 Hint: Consider the relationship between depth and waiting times.

2 more questions available

Challenge Problems

Push your limits with advanced challenges

Challenge 1 Hard

Consider a system with a 10-stage pipeline experiencing a branch every 4 cycles. Calculate the expected delay due to control hazards, assuming each delay causes a stall of 1 cycle.

💡 Hint: Break it down into how often branches happen relative to the number of stages.

Challenge 2 Hard

Evaluate how dynamic branch prediction could help mitigate the impact of control hazards in a high-frequency trading application.

💡 Hint: Think about how tracking history informs future decisions.

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