Section 18.3
Review Questions
Timing Considerations
  1. Which is faster, CPU or peripheral?
answer...
CPU
  1. Which bit could be done away with? Circle one. 
                     DA                   DR
               (data accepted)        (data ready)
answer...
DA if the CPU sets DR back to 0 once it has snarfed up the data.
  1. What is blocking in tape drives?
answer...
A technique of limiting the damage of errors by clumping data into blocks, separated by interblock gaps. If there is an error, only one block is faulty, not the entire tape.
  1. How fast were old tape drives?
answer...
75 ips (inches per second)
  1. If a 1 MIPS computer had a tape drive running at this speed, how much faster would the CPU be than the tape drive?
answer...
8 times
  1. Why do hardware designers almost never try to match the I/O processor's speed with the CPU?
answer...
it is too hard to synchronize the two, and any unevenness in speed would throw the whole system out of wahck