CSCI 4717 -- Test 1 Study Guide

Okay, we've covered alot of material since the start of the semester, and although much of it has been of the "discussion" nature, e.g., how might the size of a cache affect the speed of a small application, some of it has also been computational in nature. Below you will find a list of the topics that will be covered on Test 1. Included for each topic is the reading from the textbook for that topic. I've also tried to put together a list of the questions from previous year's tests that address that topic. You can find copies of those tests from the following links.

I would look for the test to be about 60% to 70% short answer questions such as "For a specific block size, which cache uses the most bits in a tag?" (BTW, the answer is full associative.) The remaining portion of the test will be questions longer questions such as:

• Justify why a top-down design might be better for a portable device.
• Why might a split cache have a performance lower than that of a unified cache?
• Given a list of tags from a specific type of cache, determine if a block from memory is duplicated in the cache.

Below is a mapping of previous year's tests to questions that might look good for this first test of ours.