Question 1:

a) Describe how pipelining can improves the efficiency of the fetch-execute cycle.

b) Explain the term superscalar architecture.

c) Explain the term principle of locality of reference.

d) Explain the problem of inter-instruction dependency. Discuss a possible solution to the problem.

e) Explain the term Von Neumann bottleneck.

Question 2:

a) What is displayed by the DOS display string call: Msg DB ‘A', 10 DUP (‘h'), ‘!', 13, 10, ‘

b) Given the following data segment declarations:

bytevalue BYTE 1, 2, 3, 4
wordvalue WORD 1000h, 2000h, 3000h, 4000h
dwordvalue DWORD 23456789h, 87654435h

Consider that the offset of bytevalue is 00000000h.

What is the value of the destination operand after each of the MOV instructions?
i. MOV AX, wordvalue
ii. MOV EAX, offset bytevalue+2
iii. MOV DX, wordvalue+4
iv. MOV ECX, dwordvalue+4

c) Describe the difference between the following two instructions:

• MOV AX, 0300h
• MOV AX, [0300h]

d) Given the following declaration: Greeting DB ‘Hello, friends!', 13, 10, ‘

What is displayed by?

i. _PutStr Greeting
ii. _PutStr Greeting+7

Question 3:

a) What is

i. a stack pointer?

ii. an instruction pointer?

b) With the help of an example, explain the term displacement only addressing mode.

c) Explain the four main data access methods and give one example of an entity which accesses data in each method.

d) Give properties for each of the following

i. Static RAM (SRAM)
ii. Dynamic RAM (DRAM).