CS-343 Assignment 1 Solutions
February 5, 2008

1. CPU: x86-compatible processor with 64KB each L1 I and D cache; at least 128KB
L2 cache; AMD Geode LX-700@0.8W
Reference: http://laptop.org/en/laptop/hardware/specs.shtml
The controversy is that Intel has backed out of the OLPC project and is selling
a competing device, called Classmate, that uses its own processor rather than
AMD's.

2. Apple discontinued the use of PowerPC microprocessors in 2006. All new Macs
now use x86 processors made by Intel.
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Macintosh

3. The chip inside Blue Gene/P consists of four PowerPC 450 cores running at
850MHz each. The chip inside the Blue Gene/L contained two PowerPC cores running
at 700MHz.
Reference: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/hardware/soa/IBM-s-Blue-Gene-passes-petaflop-milestone/0,130061702,339279111,00.htm

4. It's not clear what the processor is, but there is considerable speculation
that it is an ARM processor.

5. It is a RISC (reduced instruction set processor) used in many embedded
products, including several (all?) iPods.

6. A petaflop is one quadrillion (10^15) floating point operations per second.

7. Multiply feet by 12 to get inches.

8. Multiply nanoseconds by 1,000 to get picoseconds.

9. 1/4 * 10^-9 = 0.250 nsec = 250.0 psec

10. 1/0.0025 = 400 Hz

11. ceil(log2(7)) = 3 bits. One possible encoding: 000=Sun, 001=Mon, etc.

12. With a binary search, each yes/no question divides the number of possible
answers in half. This corresponds to each question establishing the value of one
bit of the binary code used to represent the set of values being searched. (But
it doesn't tell you what the actual code is.)

13. 2^30 (1,073,741,824)

14. 10^9 (1,000,000,000)