To take the quiz: read the question and formulate in your mind what you think the answer may be. Then click on the question mark, it will take you to the part of the web page where the answer can be found.

1. What is an ISA ?



2. What type of ISA do most personal computers have ?



3. What are the differences between CISC and RISC ?



4. Why aren't most personal computers RISC ?



5. Why is it getting harder to speed up CISC and RISC ?



6. What are IA-64's main design principles ?



7. What is the format of IA-64 instructions ?



8. How does IA-64 propose to eliminate branch penalties ?



9. What will IA-64 do to hide memory latency delays ?



10. How many Floating Point (FP) registers will the first IA-64 chip have ?



11. Will new IA-64 chips be backwards compatible ?



12. Why is the new IA-64 chip important to Intel ?



13. What is the advantage in adding more registers to an IA-64 chip ?



14. Are there advantages to bundling instructions the way IA-64 prescribes? What are they ?



15. What are some of the drawbacks to giving the compiler more optimizing responsibility ?



16. Are there disadvantages to IA-64's backward compatible hardware ?



17. How much is predication predicted to speed up a "typical" machine ?



18. How will IA-64 become a reality in the first chips ?



19. Will there be software available for IA-64 ?



20. Will people really buy into IA-64 ?

Thanks for taking the Quiz! I hoped that you learned something!