ECE341 Practice Question Website

Virtual memory allows us to treat the memory (DRAM) like a cache for the disk---what associativity does it implement?

Which of the folloing features are implemented directly by virtual memory (there are multiple right and wrong answers listed).

1. a larger virtual address space than physical memory
2. allow multiple processes to share a physical memory
3. higher bandwidth access to disk
4. a larger number of autovectored interrupts
5. protection between processes
6. support for memory mapped devices

For a given processor pipeline, will increasing the pipeline depth (i.e., increasing the number of pipeline stages without adding new resources) increase the number of instructions completed per cycle? Clearly answer yes or no, and explain your answer in one sentence.

Consider a disk drive that has a capacity of 8 Gigabytes (assume 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes). If that drive has 5 platters (assume that both sides are used), 10,000 tracks per surface, and an average of 200 sectors per track, how many bytes are in each sector?