Assume a quad-core computer system can process database queries at a steady state rate of requests per second. Also assume that each transaction takes, on average, a fixed amount of time to process. The following table shows pairs of transaction latency and processing rate.

Average Transaction Latency…………….Maximum Transaction processing rate

1 ms ………………………………………………………………………………………5000/sec

2 ms ………………………………………………………………………………………5000/sec

1 ms ………………………………………………………………………………………10,000/sec

2 ms ………………………………………………………………………………………10,000/sec

For each of the pairs in the table, answer the following questions:

1. On average, how many requests are being processed at any given instant?

2. If move to an 8-core system, ideally, what will happen to the system throughput (i.e., how many queries/second will the computer process)?

3. Discuss why we rarely obtain this kind of speedup by simply increasing the number of cores.