5. Write your own question and answer it. You will be graded on the complexity and depth of your answer and the question. Answer: Why is prefetching important? Please answer in the form of a sonnet (Shakespearean, Petrarchan, or Spenserian). You will be graded on form, style, and metaphor, as well as technical accuracy. As men and superscalars age, one flaw Is true of both: main memory lags behind! And should an unexpected query draw A blank from cache or frontal lobes, we find The distant answer takes too long to seek: A hundred cycles, more or less -- too long! Our friends and OS dare to call us weak, "You would not make us wait if you were strong!" And so we form a plan to stop their jests: By guessing we can start the search ahead, And put the latency *before* their tests So they shall be the bottleneck instead! For if we knew the question ere it came, Then we would be no fool in memory's game. P.S. Yes, I really came up with this question idea and this poetic response during the two-hour final. Nothing was borrowed from previous ideas, though the villanelle was good practice. The reference to "men" in the first line is not intended to be sexist, but is an attempt to reference mankind in general. It is hard to be both poetic and politically correct at once. With infinite time and cycles, it would probably be possible to write something better and less offensive. Maybe with some classical or Biblical allusions, too.