Questions on processors & architectures

1. What are the two famous architecture of CPU ?

2. What is the difference between Harvard and Von Neuman architecture ?

3. What is the use of instruction cache ?

4. Is it good to have more instruction cache or data cache ?

5. What is the use of data cache ?

6. What is the use of TLB ?

7. What do you mean by Cache Hit or Cache Miss ? What is cache hit rate ?

8. What is the difference between read miss and write miss ?

9. How does cache hit or cache miss determine the selection of processor ?

10. What is cache line or cache block ?

11. What is write-back or copy-back cache ?

12. What is the need for cache coherence protocol ?

13. What are the 3 kinds of cache misses ? or Which of the below causes the most delay and why ? Instruction read miss, Data read miss, and Data write miss .

14. What is boundary alignment and what is the use of it ?

15. What will happen if the data being fetched exceeds the cache line size ? or

if the data is not being aligned at the beginning of cache block ?

16. How can grouping of data can improve the cache based operations from application-side ?

17. What is cache prefetch ?

18. Brief up on pipelined versus Run-to-Completion processor software architecture ?

19. Why multicore processors are preferred to improve performance rather than trying to make a single processor based system faster ?

20. Does memory access speed varies at various stages ? Which is the fastest memory that you can directly deal with from a processor or Which type of memory of a CPU has almost zero percent latency ?

21. What is temporal locality and spatial locality ?

22. What are the applications of temporal locality and spatial locality ? or where are they applied in a CPU architecture ?

23. What is the use of Shadow Registers in ARM architecture ?

24. How will you calculate the idle time off a processor ?

25. How will you identify the endianness of a processor programatically ?

26. What is Memory Overlay ?

27. Tell about Bank Switching ?

28. What are the Disadvantages of Bank Switching ?

29. Why is the size of L1 cache smaller than that of the L2 cache in most of the processors ?

30. When should one use polling method and when should one use interrupt based method ? Are there scenarios in which both can be used ?

31. What could be the better way to determine the exact locations in which the prefetch instruction should be used ?

32. Considering that a processor runs at 100 MHz and the data is coming to the processor from an external device/peripheral at the rate of 1000 Mbit/s (8 Bits/Clockcycle @ 125 MHz), which is the best way to handle traffic that comes at a higher speed to the processor ?

33. Consider that there are 100 plus ways of interrupts occuring from various sensors. There are chances that all can occur at the same time too. How can the software be designed to handle it efficiently ?

34. What is Write-Back Cache ?

35. What is Write-Through Cache ?

36. What is cache coherency ?

37. What is Clock Cycles Per Instruction (CPI) ?

38. What is IPC(Instructions per cycle) ?

39. Tell about the ‘nested interrupt handler’ , ‘reentrant interrupt handler’ and ‘ prioritized direct interrupt handler’ ?

40. What is Memory Banking ? Explain w.r.t 8051 architecture

41. What is Primary Memory and What is Secondary Memory ?

42. What is the advantage of MMU ?

43. How do you determine the direction of stack growth ?

44. What is the debugger that you have used ?

45. Have you used any emulator. If yes, how have you used it ?

46. Can you tell a scenario that was very difficult to solve / fix ?

47. Have you worked on optimization w.r.t memory usage ? What techniques have you followed to optimize ?

47. Have you worked on optimization w.r.t throughput / speed ? What techniques have you followed to optimize ?

48. What kind of co-processors have you used ?