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[Mario_Hugo]

My friend won't graduate unless he finishes a bunch of questions before this afternoon. He is emplying the aid of hundreds at once. Lets band together. I'm a communications art major. I don't know the first fucking thing about answering this shit, but given the nature of the techy threads I thought I'd try you guys...

Consider a 32 bit microprocessor that has an on-chip 16 KByte four-way-set-associative cache. Assume that teh cache has a line size of four 32-bit words. Draw a block diagram of this cache showing its organization and how the different address fields are used to determine a cache hit/miss. Where in the cache is the word from memory location ABCDE8F8 mapped?

 

[Particle Physicist]

haha.. oh boy, i used to be able to answer that.

 

[darscot]

haha.. oh boy, i used to be able to answer that.

LOL, I hear yah. Now I just say fucked if I know. I work in software hardware is down the hall.

 

[Ferrio]

Hah, I'm a senior and I can't answer that. Sounds more like a Computer Engineering question than Computer Science.

 

[Azih]

Yeah you'd have to take a few hardware courses for that stuff.

I took one hardware course for my software eng degree and we barely got past "This is what RAM is made of!" and I don't even remember that :lol spent most of the time making circuits with simple gates.

 

[teiresias]

Hehe, I'm an EE and I could have answered that question maybe 3 years ago, but I haven't had to worry about cache organizations in so long that I'd have to dig out my computer architecture textbook to answer it.

 

[robox]

i got about 80% of that question... only because my hardware course was just last year...

the first part is easy... just describes the structure...
4 x 32 bit words per line
# lines = 16kbytes / 128 bits

4 way associative means each line gets place in 1 of 4 partitions

don't remember much about hit/miss rates...

and to find something with a memory address, you gotta know which bits refer to what
ie which bits refer it to which of the 4 partitions it is in, which bits refer to which word in the line

 

[Foreign Jackass]

I used to teach a lab that would have answered the first 80% of the question. But the last part, I never teached/learned. So well, doesn't matter what I tell ya anyways.