Evaluate systems architecture Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Evaluate systems architecture - Essay Example The kind of memory used on CPUs has to be fast speed and is limited in size. These are the registers. Below is the Von Neumann architecture on which all other architectures are based; Traditionally, CPUs did not have many registers and comprised numerous memory addressing techniques. However, after intensive research, it was found that these features made the computers less efficient. Major issues included rare use of specialized instructions, increased the frequency of memory access due to few general-purpose registers. This feature also reduced the amount of addressable memory space for computers. The time required for instruction execution was also unnecessarily lengthened by lack of registers. An example of such processors is the intel x86 processor. These came up as a solution to increase the efficiency of computers. They use a technique called parallelism, which has the effect of increasing the overall speed of execution of computers. Through data dependency where the output of one operation is the input of the next, concurrency can be achieved. CPUs using VLIW architecture have 64 general purpose registers at their disposal. Their instruction words are 128 bits long which is then divided into 4 atoms each 32 bits long. Below is a graphical depiction of VLIW architecture. Intel was the originator of the EPIC architecture and used it on their IA-64 processor. It clusters instructions before execution. Its instruction word size is 41 bits with 256 registers. The clusters are 128 bits wide. Execution of instructions occurs in cycles. Instructions and data are stored in the computer’s hard disk. For execution, they are loaded in main memory from where the CPU can reference them. The fetch execute cycle then begins. The CPU speed is much faster than memory. The time it takes to fetch an instruction from main memory into the CPU is enough for execution of an instruction. Therefore, CPUs are equipped with an onboard fast memory chip called