1. (4 Points) Instruction pipelines have been widely used to speed up the execution of instructions in CPU. However, the conditional branch is one of the major factors that may affect the performance of the instruction pipeline adversely. List and briefly describe TWO approaches that can be used to deal with conditional branches.

2. (3 Points) Symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) machine is one of the popular parallel architectures. List at least THREE of the major characteristics of a symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) machine.

3. ( 3 Points) Considering the design constraints (cost, access time, capacity) on a computers memory module, explain why the memory hierarchy that consists of multiple memory components (such as registers, caches, main memory, disks, etc.) is typically employed instead of a single memory component in modern computer systems.