CS-343 Assignment 6

Due Date and Submission

This assignment is due by midnight, May 23. Submit it by sending email to me at the address, vickery@babbage.cs.qc.edu. Be sure to put "CS-343 Assignment 6" in the subject of your email and to put your name/ID in the message body.

The Assignment

The assignment is to write out the answers to Exercises 8.1, 8.2, 8.5, 8.6, 8.7, 8.8, and 8.10 on pages 342 - 344 of the textbook. In addition, answer the questions below. Submit your answers in the body of your email message, not as an attachment, and not as a Word or PDF document.

Remember, you are encouraged to use the Discussion Board on the course's Blackboard page (blackboard.qc.edu) when you are working on this and all other assignments in this course.

Additional Questions

In addition to the questions from the textbook listed above, answer the following questions:

  1. What is the clock speed of the USB busses in Figure 8-7? (Hint: USB stands for Universal Serial Bus. That is, there is one data bit transferred per clock pulse.)
  2. The USB 2.0 specification provides three bandwidth capacities, called "high speed," "full speed," and "limited capacity low speed." Match these bandwidths to the following transfer rates: 1.5Mb/s, 12Mb/s, and 480Mb/s. How sincerely would you congratulate your friend who just bought a computer with a "full speed USB 2.0" port? (Hint: The folks who developed the USB specification have been criticized for using the term "full speed" to mean less than the fastest speed.) And how would you answer the previous question given the information provided in this question? That is, what is the difference between 1.5MB/s and 1.5Mb/s?
  3. A high-quality digital camera stores pictures in "raw" mode, meaning there is no compression of the data. Each pixel has 256 intensities for red, green, and blue, and a picture is taken at a resolution of 1600x1200 pixels.
    1. How big is an image, in bits?
    2. How big is an image, in bytes?
    3. How long will it take to transfer an image from the camera to a computer using each of the three USB 2.0 bandwidths?
  4. Here is a quotation from an Intel web page: "The AGP3.0 Specification increased the strobe rate from 266MT/s with AGP2.0 to 533MT/s with AGP3.0. This now doubles the peak AGP bandwidth to 2.1 GB/s.
    1. Given what you know about bandwidth, what must "strobe rate" mean, and what does the "T" in "MT/s" stand for?
    2. What is the data width of the AGP bus?
    3. Figure 8-7 shows an "AGP 2X" graphics interface. Examine the diagram carefully and relate it to the quote above. Does the figure in the book show an AGP2.0 system? How do you know?
  5. A computer has a PCI bus that operates at 66MHz and a width of 32 bits.
    1. What is the bandwidth of this bus?
    2. Two IDE disk drives are connected to this PCI bus. They rotate at 10k rpm. Each track consists of 1024 sectors, and each sector is 512 bytes.
      1. How much bandwidth is required to transfer a track of data from one disk to memory?
      2. Can this PCI bus support both drives transferring tracks to memory at full speed at the same time?
  6. Using the disk drives and the PCI bus from the previous question, tell how much bandwidth and how many interrupts would be involved in transferring one sector of data to memory using a DMA controller, and without using a DMA controller.
  7. Tell whether each of the following is implemented in hardware or in software:
  8. The following items list a possible sequence of events. For each item, tell whether it is "okay" where it is in the list or not. If it is okay, tell whether there are any other events that must occur before it happens.