Spring 2019 EE380 Assignment 0

Use this WWW form to submit your assignment. You may submit your assignment as many times as you wish; when the submission deadline, Thursday, February 7, 2019, is reached, your last recorded submission will be the one counted by the TA for grading. Note that each question is tagged with the course outcome(s) it addresses.

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1. For this question, check all that apply. Which of the following five statements about current computer hardware is/are true?
   The internet is a LAN
   An optical mouse actually contains a high-speed camera
   A typical PC processor now operates with a clock period of less than a nanosecond
   An SSD should outlast a hard disk in an application that is continually rewriting data
   One pixel in a digital camera generally is filtered to see red, green, or blue light, not all three
2. Here's one to look up in the history reference materials.... Which of the following folks is now generally credited with implementing the first floating-point arithmetic?
   Bill Gates
   Alan Turing
   Konrad Zuse
   John von Neumann
   Grace Murray Hopper
3. In 1999, AMD's K7 (the original Athlon) contained about 22,000,000 transistors. Given that, about how many of those processors could fit on a chip using the state-of-the-art technologies that AMD used for their Epyc 7601 chip in 2017? (Hint: you can guess correctly based on knowing how many years were between the two parts being released.)
   1
   10
   1,000
   100,000
   10,000,000
4. For this question, check all that apply. Which of the following five choices is/are among the "eight great ideas" discussed in class and the text's first chapter?
   Parallel processing
   Optimizing for the common cases
   Programming in high-level languages
   Use of a state machine to implement control logic
   Anticipating how computer technology will change over time
5. For this question, check all that apply. Which of the following statements about how computer technology has been changing over the last few decades is/are true?
   Main memory has been getting faster
   Disk capacity has been getting larger
   The number of transistors/chip is increasing
   Computer logic designs have been getting simpler
   Power consumption per transistor has been decreasing
6. Computer architecture is a field in which lifelong learning plays a critical role, in part because many aspects of computer architecture are expected to change in fundamental ways throughout your career. A key reason is found in how performance of different subsystems changes over time. Some years ago, computers often accessed instructions and data directly from main memory; briefly explain why computers now have a memory hierarchy.
   
7. For this question, check all that apply. Which of the following things is/are associated with an Instruction Set Architecture (ISA)?
   Machine Code
   Assembly Language
   Processor clock frequency
   High-level programming language
   Number of clock cycles/instruction
8. What is meant by the phrase multi-core processor?
   
9. Most cell phones now use a pouch battery that is permanently glued inside rather than an individually-packaged user-interchangeable battery. Broader impact refers to potential benefit, or harm, to society as a whole. Briefly describe one negative broader impact of consumer devices using permanently glued-in batteries and include a URL for an article supporting your claim:
   

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