Question

Suppose we have a six-stage pipelined processor with 500 ps cycle time.

Running a particular benchmark program which executes 1 billion (10 to the 9th power) instructions in a simulator, we determine that 5% of its instructions require exactly one cycle of stalling and 10% require exactly two cycles of stalling and no instructions would require more than two cycles of stalling.

(For the purposes of this question, a cycle of stalling means one bubble (hardware-generated nop) inserted in the pipeline rather than advancing an instruction. Assume we attribute each stall to exactly one instruction.)

Assume these stalls are the only reasons why the processor would not complete one program instruction every cycle.

To the nearest millisecond, how long (in milliseconds) will the benchmark program take to run? Write your answer as a base-10 number of milliseconds.

Answer 1

answer to above question.