I. True and False
1. SIMD's enable a single instruction to process multiple pieces of
data simultaneously.
True
2. One improvement that MMX has over non-MMX pentium processors is that
157 new microprocessor instructions have been added that are designed to
handle video, audio, and graphical data more efficiently.
False -- it's 57 new instructions.
3. The PowerPC architecture is a (0, 2) instruction set architecture.
False -- it's a (0,4) ISA
4. Inter-Element Arithmetic Operations perform summations of elements
in a source register with a seperate accumulation register.
True
5. AltiVec is Motorola's first implementation of SIMD in it's mainstream
processor, the PowerPC.
True
II. Matching
| 1. SIMD -- c. Another name for short vector processor.
2. MMX -- e. 8 bytes at one time. 3. Katmai's New Instruction -- a. Intel's SIMD processor that will be released in early 1999 4. AltiVec -- d. 162 new instructions to the PowerPC architecture to work with it. 5. Operating System -- b. Flips in and out of MMX and FP mode |
III. Short Answer
1. What are five areas in computing that SIMD's improve performance?
3D Software, Imaging, Video, Speech Rocognition, Audio
2. List three different kinds of parallelism that Motorola will support
with AltiVec.
16 way parallelism for 8-bit signed and unsigned integers and characters
8 way parallelism for 16-bit signed and unsigned integers
4 way parallelism for 32-bit signed and unsigned integers and IEE
floating point numbers
3. Name a microarchitecture techniques that helps improve processor
performance.
Any of the following would do: branch prediction, superscalar execution,
and/or superpipelining.