Consider a computer system with DMA support.
The DMA module transfers one 8-bit character in one CPU cycle using cycle stealing. The processor speed is 2 MHz and 0.5% of processor cycles are used for DMA. The data transfer rate of the device is \(\underline{\hspace{2cm}}\) bits per second.

Question

With respect to a TCP connection between a client and a server, which of the following is true?

Answer 1

To determine the data transfer rate of the device, we need to analyze the given information about the DMA and processor system.

The processor operates at a speed of 2 MHz, which means there are \(2 \times 10^6\) cycles per second.
Each DMA transfer uses one CPU cycle to transfer an 8-bit character.
0.5% of the processor cycles are used by the DMA for data transfer.

From the above, the number of cycles used by the DMA per second for data transfer can be calculated as:

\[ \text{DMA cycles per second} = 0.5\% \times 2 \times 10^6 = \frac{0.5}{100} \times 2,000,000 = 10,000 \text{ cycles per second} \]

Since each cycle transfers one character (8 bits), the data transfer rate is:

\[ 10,000 \text{ cycles/second} \times 8 \text{ bits/cycle} = 80,000 \text{ bits per second} \]

The computed data transfer rate is 80,000 bits per second, which falls within the given range of 80,000 to 80,000, confirming its accuracy.

Show Hint