Exam Questions

You will be asked two questions at the exam, one main (primary) question and one control (secondary) question. We expect that you answer the control question first quickly (2-3 min) and then spend 10 min on the main question. If you pick the main question on computer architecture then the control question will be on computer network and vice versa. The questions will be picked from the following question list. For each question, the relevant lecture slides will be available for you to use for your presentation and subsequent discussion. You will not be allowed to use your own slides.

Computer Architecture

This is a complete list of all topics covered in the lectures, the book, or the exercises.

Digital circuits
- Transistors
  - Transistors as switches.
  - Principle of photo-lithography.
- Gates
  - Boolean algebra.
  - Truth tables.
- Software vs. hardware
  - Replication and parallelism.
- Power consumption
  - Dissipation formula.
Data representation
- Binary encoding of numbers
  - Signed and unsigned integers encoding.
  - Range limits.
  - Hexadecimal notation.
  - Endianness.
  - Principles for encoding of floats.
  - Precision limits, number density.
  - Application with shifts and masks.
Processors
- Vol Neumann Architecture
  - Stored program.
  - Fetch-and-execute cycle.
- Structure of processors
  - Computational units - ALU, MMU, FPU.
  - Registers.
  - Cache.
  - Micro-controller.
Instruction sets
- Opcode, operands, registers.
- Differences RISC/CISC.
- Types of instructions.
- Types of registers.
- Register allocation and spilling.
- Operand addressing
  - Explicit/implicit operands.
  - Tradeoffs.
Execution
- Pipelines and superscalar architectures.
- Principle of out-of-order execution.
- Principle of branch prediction.
- Making programs pipeline friendly.
Modes of execution
- What they define.
- OS and application modes.
Microcode
- Micro vs. macro-code.
- Advantages and drawbacks.
- Principle of horizontal microcode - parallelism.

Assembly languages

Differences between
- high and low level languages,
- compilers and assemblers.
Principles for encoding
- function calls,
- if statements,
- loops.

Physical and virtual memories

Technology characteristics - density, cost, bandwidth, latency.
SRAM vs. DRAM.
Memory hierarchy.
Temporal and spatial locality of programs.
Importance of alignment of data.
Limits of addressing.
Content addressable memory.
Virtual memory
- Benefits.
- MMU
  - Mapping virtual to physical addresses.
  - Memory protection.
- Demand paging
  - Segmentation.
  - Resident vs. non-resident pages.
  - Pages.
- Page tables
  - How address translation works.
  - Role of OS.
  - Necessity for hardware support.
  - What a TLB is.

Caches

Importance of caches.
Memory mountain.
Write-through and write-back caches.
Direct mapping and set associative caches.
Principle of LRU replacement policy.

Network Architecture

This is a complete list of all topics covered in the lectures, the book, or the exercises.

Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Application Layer I
Chapter 2: Application Layer II
Chapter 3: Transport Layer I
Chapter 3: Transport Layer II
Chapter 4: The Network Layer I
Chapter 4: The Network Layer II
Chapter 5: The Link Layer and LANs I
Chapter 5:The Link Layer and LANs II
Chapter 6: Wireless and Mobile Networks