a) A father bought two laptops for his two sons. The first laptop for the elder son had a processor clock speed of 3.5 GHZ. The second laptop for the younger brother had a processor clock speed of 3.3 GHz. All things being equal the 3.5 GHz laptop would be faster. One day they decided to test the performance of their laptops.

The 3.5 GHz processor was tested with the Whetstone benchmark and the 3.3 GHz was tested Dhrystone benchmark. The 3.3 GHz processor finished executing first.

(i) What was wrong with the approach of comparing the performances of the two processors?

(ii)  How would you do the comparisons?

b) Consider the decimal number 96.625. Convert this number to IEEE7T4 Floating point format single precision format.