Reading Assignment
- Background_Material. This is a PDF that covers various topics related to measurement covered in the first two lectures of the course. The questions below are based, in part, on that material.
- Sections 1-6 of Appendix C of the textbook. If your copy of the text did not include the CD in the back, there is a PDF of the appendix available here.
- If you studied some assembly language other than MIPS in your prerequisite for this course (or if you did, but your MIPS skills are rusty) study Sections 1-10 of Chapter 2 of the textbook. You will need to comfortable with this material when we finish Appendix C. That means you have a few weeks to go through this material, but it’s important to start now.
Assignment To Hand In
You can either write the answers to these questions on a piece of paper and bring them to class on the due date, or you can type them in the body of an email and send them to me by midnight of the due date.
Be sure to put your name on your assignment paper or in the body of your email so I know who submitted it.
If you submit the assignment by email, the subject line must be:
CS-343 Assignment 1in order for it to get through my spam filters.
Go to the course schedule page for the link to my contact information (email address). While you are on the schedule page, follow the link to the course syllabus for information on course policies with regard to homework assignment grading and late assignments.
Hand in your written answers to the following questions:
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What is the logarithm, base 2, of the following decimal numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,
16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 768, 1024, 2048.
Note: if you do not have a calculator that computes logarthms to the base 2, you can do the calculation by taking the log to any base (e or 10, for example) and then dividing that by the log of 2 for the same base. For example log10(10) is 1.0; log10(2) is 0.3010; so log2(10) is 1.0 ÷ 0.3010 = 3.322. Alternatively, you could go to WolframAlpha and type in "log2(10)" to get the answer. (There are plenty of other places you could get the value, but WolframAlpha is the best time suck. If you aren’t familiar with WA, try typing in "88mph" or your birthday and see what it gives you.)
- Write the following decimal numbers in binary: 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, 32, 36, 40, 48.
- What do all the binary numbers in your previous answer have in common (besides the fact that they are binary numbers!). Look at the pattern of zeros and ones.
- How about 12, 24, and 48: what binary pattern do they have in common?
- Summarize the answers to the two previous questions as a statement about what happens when you multiply binary numbers by 2 or by 4.
- 5K is 1010000000000 in binary. (5 followed by ten zeros.) Write the values 5M and 5G in binary.
- What is binary 1100 0000000000 0000000000 in decimal? Use the proper suffix in your answer so that your answer starts with a number between 0 and 1023.
- How many picoseconds are there in 2.5 µsec?
- How many nanoseconds in 250 psec?
- What power of 2 is 512?
- Approximately how many milliseconds did it take you to answer the previous question?
- What is the period, in picoseconds, of a 5 GHz clock?
- What is the answer to the previous question in nanoseconds?
- Why does it make sense to say that a 10 MHz clock is twice as fast as a 5 MHz clock, but not to say that 100 degrees (farenheit) is twice as hot as 50 degrees?
- How did Claude Shannon propose measuring information?
- What is the frequency of a clock with a period of 50 msec?
- What is the frequency of a clock with a period of 50 µsec?
- What is the frequency of a clock with a period of 50 nsec?