A Silicon Valley company is looking to increase the performance of its workstations. Analysis of the applications that its customers are using has shown that the average response time breaks down into three main categories: CPU time, memory system time, and host/client communication time.
A meeting is convened to discuss how the response time can be improved. At the meeting, the network people are quite embarrassed by the proportion of host/client time, and they promise that by using a more suitable network, host/client communications will be sped up by 10 times.
Next, the memory designers speak, and they predict that by using a new design the memory system time can be reduced to 10% of the total response time. (Assuming that the other two components are not changed.)
a) If after only the network changes, the response time is distributed 74%, 25%, and 1% between the CPU, memory system, and communication respectively, how much faster are the original workstations after both the network and memory system improvements?
b) Lastly, the CPU designers take the podium, and they announce (having carefully listened to the previous two groups) that including their enhancements to the CPU, the total speedup (after all the group’s improvement will be two times. How much are the CPU designers planning to speed up the CPU?
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