英语硕士论文篇1

关键词：研究生教育；基础能力；创新精神；学术个性

中图分类号：G643.2文献标识码：A文章编号：1671—1580（2013）02—0049—02

在我国，随着硕士点不断增多和研究生招生规模的不断扩大，英语语言文学硕士点也在不断增多，如何提高英语语言文学专业硕士研究生的培养质量成了许多高校面临的课题。本文将就我国目前英语语言文学专业硕士阶段存在的普遍问题加以分析，并就如何提高该专业硕士研究生的综合素质和研究能力提出几点建议。

关于英语语言文学专业硕士研究生的培养方案，大部分院校涉及到了以下大同小异的官话：“本专业所培养的硕士研究生应具有坚实的英语语言文学及相关学科的基础理论和较系统的专业知识，掌握本学科的研究现状和发展趋势；毕业后能在本学科领域独立从事教学和研究，或在实际工作部门从事相关工作。”但如果对许多院校给该专业开设的课程做一些调查研究，结果就会发现，大多院校在培养方案的制定上都忽略了英语语言文学专业由于本科阶段课程设置所带来的一些问题或现象。那就是中文功底较差，中英文语言表达尴尬。培养方案上没有继续加强这些本科语言生的语言基础教育，较为缺乏分析问题和解决问题的能力。因为他们本科阶段的主要任务就是打好语言基础。

鉴于以上种种问题，英语语言文学专业硕士研究生的培养究竟应该如何进行，如何引导学生全面发展，重点突出，又如何才能使得他们在校期间获得一定的研究能力，并在以后的工作中获得长足的发展呢？我认为，无论是作为英语语言文学方向的研究生，还是作为英语语言文学专业研究生的培养者，都应当从以下三点出发提高研究生的综合素质和教育水平。

一、加强基础能力培养

美国研究生培养体系的建立是与美国19世纪工业革命和经济发展的浪潮急需大批专业人才相适应的。而我国目前经济的飞速发展也同样急需大量的专业人才，硕士生的扩招也正是为满足这一点的需要。经多年发展，研究生培养的规则规范、方法程序的不断完善，形成了美国研究生教育独特的风格和模式。由于研究生教育主要在培养环节，培养的过程和方式就直接决定着研究生的质量。美国的大学尤其是名牌大学在研究生培养机制上的最最主要特点是注重基础训练。与本科教育培养合格劳动力的目标不同，美国大学的研究生教育目标始终定位在培养高层次创造型人才上。他们特别重视学科基础训练以及相关知识和方法的深厚积累。认为基础牢固，学科方法熟练，才有可能从事高深的、具有创造性的工作与研究，从而达到较高的成就。如果我们承认美国在研究生培养方面加强基础能力的培养是正确的话，那么我们也应当加强硕士生基础能力的培养。

我国的英语语言文学方向的研究生和国外以英语为母语的同方向研究生的培养方案有且一定有很大的差别。我国英语语言文学方向的研究生所肩负的任务是“洋为中用”，也就是说要把西方的文学作品、艺术、理论、文化、语言等引进、介绍、翻译、诠释甚至改造为我国本土所使用。所以，任务是复杂的，艰巨的，有重大意义的，而此项任务所要求的能力也是非常的。它既需要英语语言的综合功底，也需要中文语言的综合功底。既需要双语纯语言的功底，也需要双语的文学功底，还需要做研究的理论功底。

二、鼓励发扬创新精神

加强研究生创新能力和科研创新意识的培养，鼓励研究生开展原创性研究是研究生培养的一个重要任务之一。英语语言文学专业也不例外。因为只有这样，研究生才可能出成果，甚至出新成果，出好成果。而要达到这种创新的效果，就要求研究生教育的协同式创新。就是说，既要求和鼓励学生创新，又要从培养模式上开展创新。

从培养模式上，首先要推进研究生教育培养、管理模式改革。为了适应研究生教育规模扩大的需要，要建立开放的研究生教育管理模式。鼓励和推进研究生培养模式由导师培养为主转向以导师组或导师团队为主，创造条件，积极为研究生提供助教、助研岗位。英语语言文学方向的研究生教育可争取校内部分学科间（如汉语言文学，哲学，历史等学科）交叉培养并学分互认，实现研究生教育优质资源的共享共用，探索出英语语言文学方向创新型的研究生教育和管理模式。

从鼓励和激发学生的创新精神上讲，首先，可以通过增加学术讲座，积极主动地开拓学生的视野。因为每一场学术讲座凝聚着该学者的学术研究精华。作为英语语言文学专业，除了从国内聘请相关学者做学术讲座外，主要考虑从英语国家邀请更多的本学科的学者来讲座，让学生直接面对国外该学科的前沿。同样为了开拓学生的视野，鼓励学生积极参加本校内举办的各种学生本人感兴趣的学术讲座。也提倡鼓励学生走出去，关注其他高校学术讲座动态，并在条件允许的情况下，由导师带领学生参加学术会议为研究生进行学术交流积极提供平台。

不过，研究生、导师和培养环境这三个要素在研究生教育中均具有双重性。研究生教育协同式创新的结果会是和谐发展、激发创新、师生双赢。在这样的浓厚学术氛围里，它起到了对研究生的成长引导、激发的作用。他们在一起交流体会，砥砺思想，从这个意义和作用上来说，是其他任何形式难以替代的，他们得到的不仅是有形的知识，更重要的是对心灵的启发、灵感的滋润、思想的激荡，是终生受益的。因此，在研究生拥有了扎实的基本研究能力后，在他们的积极主动的创新能力得到保护和发扬后，然后才谈得上他们在学术上的个性化研究与发展。

三、积极提倡学术个性

蔡元培先生曾经给即将赴欧美留学的同学这样讲过：“不要失去‘我性’，作为中国人的个性，不要被同化。”由此可见，老一代中国学者是十分重视“我性”即“个性”的。当今大部分的学术著作都缺乏“我性”，缺乏作者个人的性情与见解，这种没有“我性”的学术当然也就不可能引起同行的兴趣，也不值得推广或参考，它只是作者自己用来当作晋升的资本而已。因此，坚持个性化学术研究，才利于创新，也有利于个人甚至中国学术的发展。

对于英语语言文学方向的研究生来说，研究国外的东西，如果没有创新与个性，就很难做出成果，这就更要求学生进行个性化研究。比如，我们研究美国诗歌，也许比不了美国同行。但美国学者研究美国诗歌欧洲学者研究美国诗歌，和我们研究美国诗歌同样都有其价值，他们有他们的思想，我们有我们的感受。有些东西，他们未必想到，我们会可能提出新的研究角度或新的看法。

从另一方面讲，英语语言文学学科学生可以利用对中西文化相通的优势，进行中西对比的研究。可以从文学、文化，语言学、宗教、翻译等自己感兴趣的方面入手研究。或从其他学科入手，比如，从心理学，生理学，犯罪学，人类学，美学等方法入手研究文学等。

简言之，培养和保护研究生的研究个性，要发挥导师在研究生培养中的作用，支持导师尊重学生个性和兴趣，根据研究领域设立“个性化”培养方案，从而达到因材施教，鼓励创新，激扬个性风采的效果。

综上，英语语言文学方向研究生的培养，和其他学科研究生的培养模式一样，要结合本学科的特点，从基础抓起，注重基本能力和技能的培养，并在此基础上，创造协同式创新的培养模式和氛围，积极鼓励学生发扬创新精神，提倡引导研究生向个性化学术研究发展。

[参考文献]

[1]李美霞.英语语言文学专业硕士研究生教育问题思索[J].北京第二外国语学院学报，2005（04）.

[2]徐烈炯.外文系怎么办[J].外国语，2004（01）.

英语硕士论文篇2

中图分类号：H314 文献标识码：A

Comparative Analysis of Reporting Verbs in Literature Review of M.A. Theses

WANG Hui

(Shandong Normal University, Ji'nan, Shandong 250014)

AbstractThis study, following Hyland's categories of reporting verbs, aims to make an investigation into reporting verbs in Literature Reviews in English M.A. theses by English native speakers and those by Chinese learners of English. The results of a detailed comparative analysis of data reveal that there are some considerable similarities and remarkable differences in the use of reportingverbs between the two corpora. Generally speaking, the density of reporting verbs in ELRs is higher than that in CLRs. It is found that Research verbs and Discourse verbs are preferred in both ELRs and CLRs whereas more Research verbs and Cognition verbs appear in CLRs. With regard to tenses of reporting verbs, the simple present tense is the most widely used one in both corpora, whereas total occurrence of the simple present tense employed in CLRs is higher than that in ELRs. In terms of voice of reporting verbs, passive voice is used more frequently in ELRs than in CLRs.

Key wordsreporting verbs; literature Review; M.A. theses; comparative analysis

0 引言

Swales (1990) 的体裁理论认为，语篇是一种具有交际目的的社会活动，这一交际目的决定了语篇的结构框架，并影响、限制了语篇的内容与风格的选择。硕士论文文献综述部分主要是作者转述或概括总结前人的研究成果并进行评价，这一交际目的主要是通过“转述”这一修辞手段实现。作者在转述他人的观点或研究成果时，往往通过转述动词表明作者对被转述人或被转述信息的态度，从而建立自己的研究空间。转述动词是学术论文中最清晰的评价手段之一。

Hyland (2002c) 在Thompson and Ye’s (1991) 的基础上对转述动词的分类做了进一步的简化，见表1。

表1转述动词的分类

人们在写作中提及或转述前人的研究时，在时态和语态上通常需要遵守一些惯例。常用的有三种时态：一般现在时、一般过去时和现在完成时。一般而言，从使用过去时态过渡到使用现在完成时再到一般现在时，意味着被转述信息在某些方面与作者越来越近：或接近于作者的观点，或接近于作者自己的研究，或接近于目前的知识状态（Swales & Feak, 1994）。语态则分为主动语态和被动语态，常用是主动语态，被动语态出现的比率很小。

1 语料与研究步骤

本论文的研究语料共包括50篇文献综述，由两部分组成：25篇是由以英语为母语的研究生所作的文献综述，另外25篇是由以英语为外语的中国研究生所作的文献综述。其中前者选自PQDD上美国著名大学硕士研究生学位论文，后者源于中国知网上中国著名大学英语专业硕士毕业论文。这50篇文献综述的作者均毕业于2005至2009年期间（包括2005年和2009年）。首先对语料进行细致的检索，并确定并提取转述动词。根据Hyland (2002c) 对于转述动词的分类方法，对语料中的转述动词进行分类和对比。接着对转述动词的时态和语态选择进行对比分析。通过T检测来比较所得的数据。

2 研究结果与讨论

2.1 转述动词在语料中的数量分布

作者对50篇文献综述中的转述动词进行了统计，在25篇英语本族语者所作的文献综述中共有1293个转述动词，而在另外25篇中国英语专业硕士论文文献综述中仅有809个转述动词，见表2。结果显示，国外语料中转述动词的数量比国内语料多，这说明以英语为母语的学生转述动词的使用意识要高于中国学生。

表2转述动词在两组语料中的数量

2.2 转述动词在语料中的分布

根据Hyland (2002c)对转述动词的分类，作者对两组语料进行了细致分析和统计，具体的类别分布如表3所示。

表3转述动词类别在两组语料中的分布

可以看出，两组语料中研究性动词和语篇性动词的使用频率较高，而与以英语为母语的外国学生相比，中国学生更偏向使用研究性动词和认知性动词。三种转述动词在两组语料中出现的数量差别显著（P < 0.005）。

接下来，作者又对语料中出现的高频率转述动词进行了统计，具体的频率分布见表4。

表4高频率转述动词在两组语料中的分布

可以看出，在国外语料中高频率使用的转述动词有37个，而国内语料中高频率使用的转述动词仅有25个，这说明以英语为母语的学生在转述动词的使用方面比中国学生更加灵活和熟练。两组语料中出现的使用频率最高的动词都是find, 各出现的78次和46次。因此，高频率转述动词在两组语料中的分布既存在相似之处，又存在显著的差异。

2.3 转述动词时态在两组语料中的分布

表5转述动词的时态在两组语料中的分布

中国学生和以英语为母语的学生在转述动词的时态选择上都显示了各自的特点。两组语料中转述动词的时态分布见表5。

可以看出，与以英语为母语的国外学生相比，中国硕士生在转述语的时态选择上存在着很大的不同。较之其他时态，中国学生选择最多的是一般现在式。两组语料中转述动词时态的使用频率在统计上存在显著差异（P < 0.005）。研究结果表明，中国学生偏向使用一般现在时，目的在于体现他们对被转述作者或被转述信息的客观态度，从而建立自己在学术界的地位。以上结果一方面说明中国学生缺乏英语时态惯用条例的知识，同时也反映了他们缺乏对前人研究批判性的评价，这对科研创新有着不利的影响。

2.4 转述动词语态在两组语料中的分布

除了时态之外，作者还对两组语料中的转述动词的语态进行了对比分析，其结果可见表6。

表6转述动词的语态在两组语料中的分布

如表6所示，两组语料中转述动词的时态主要是主动语态，少数使用了被动语态。然而，主动语态与被动语态在两组语料中的频率分布存在显著差异（P < 0.005）。与国外的学生相比，中国学生更偏向于使用主动语态，目的在于强调被转述作者而不是被转述信息，从而表达对被转述作者的态度。

3 结论

通过上述对比分析，我们可以得出以下结论：大部分学生能够积极地借助转述语这一修辞手段进行文献综述的写作，表现在他们能够选择多种转述动词以及使用不同的时态和语态。但与以英语为母语的学生相比，他们在转述动词的使用方面还存在着一定的问题。中国学生对于转述动词在文献综述写作中的重要性还认识不足；大多数中国硕士研究生还不能够熟练和灵活的使用转述动词，表现在他们使用的转述动词数量较少、动词类别不够丰富、时态惯例知识匮乏、对被动语态的功能认识不足等方面。中国学生使用转述语主要目的在于将被转述作者或被转述信息作为自己研究的权威支持，缺乏对他人研究的批判性评价。这样他们就很容易将自己的研究空间限制于一个很有限的范围之内。

参考文献

[1]Hyland, K. 2002c. Activity and evaluation: reporting practics in academic writing[A]. In Flowerdew, J. (ed.) Academic Discourse[C]. London: Pearson Education Limited, 115-130.

[2]Swales, J. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Setting[M]. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.

英语硕士论文篇3

2）理论概述

3）研究方法

4）个案研究5）分析讨论

6）结论

2、论文形式

1）语言

2）论文各部分的顺序

3）引文形式

4）字数要求

5）定义

6）图表

3、排版格式

1）封面

2）格式

三、附录

附录1-开题报告范例

附录2-引文范例

附录3-参考文献范例

附录4-封面范例

前言

我院历届研究生论文写作和答辩过程中，都会遇到一些有关论文写作规范的问题，近年来研究生的人数不断增加，这方面的问题更显突出。鉴于此，英语学院决定制定硕士研究生论文格式规范，通过科学、严谨、合理的研究生论文格式，使我院研究生论文写作进一步规范化，符合现行学术主流的要求，提高研究生论文质量和研究生培养的整体水平。

本格式规范参照现行学术论文的规范与要求，主要对论文格式予以规范，对于论文的内容结构略有涉及，但是考虑到各研究方向的不同特点，在这方面不拟过细规定。这方面的知识在相关课程特别是论文写作课程上应有详细介绍。本格式规范包含以下两部分：一、开题报告；二、论文。

一、开题报告

由于开题报告是用文字体现的论文总构想，因而篇幅不必过大，但要把计划研究的课题、如何研究、理论适用等主要问题说清楚，应包含两个部分：总述、提纲。

1总述

开题报告的总述部分应首先提出选题，并简明扼要地说明该选题的目的、目前相关课题研究情况、理论适用、研究方法、必要的数据等等。

2提纲

开题报告包含的论文提纲可以是粗线条的，是一个研究构想的基本框架。可采用整句式或整段式提纲形式。在开题阶段，提纲的目的是让人清楚论文的基本框架，没有必要像论文目录那样详细。

3参考文献

开题报告中应包括相关参考文献的目录（参考文献的规范见附录3）

4要求

开题报告应有封面页，总页数应不少于4页。版面格式应符合以下第3部分第2）项“格式”的规定。

5范例

（参见附录1）

二、论文

1论文内容

论文的基本内容应包括：1）引论；2）理论概述；3）研究方法；4）个案研究；5）分析讨论；6）结论；

1)引论

引论可以是开篇的一个独立部分，也可以是论文的第一章，其中应对论文的论题、主旨、理论根据、研究目标、论文纲要等必要内容，做一个清楚明确的说明。

2)理论概述

这一部分是对论文所依据的理论进行的阐述，可涉及主要理论和相关理论，以及就论文所研究的问题，目前理论研究达到的程度。理论概述可以独立成篇，也可包括在引论部分中，可视情况而定；

3)研究方法

和理论概述一样，研究方法也可在引论中加以阐述。除说明研究方法之外，还应说明所采用的方法的适用性、必要性和科学性。

4)个案研究

这一部分应给出研究实例，实例应当是客观的、适用的、按照科学的方法选择的，并对选择的方法加以说明。

5)分析讨论

分析讨论应当层次清晰，可以针对前述个案，也可在不需要具体实例的情况下，对所提出的问题进行分析讨论。

6)结论

结论可以是论文的最后一章，应在结论中对分析讨论及其结果作扼要的叙述，说明研究的主要发现、其理论和/或实践意义、研究的局限、对进一步研究的建议等等。

如有必要，以上各项的顺序可调整，也可把某两项合并成一项，但是为清晰起见，章节不应过少。

2论文形式

1）语言

根据有关规定，英语学院的硕士论文一律用英语写作，但应包含一个与英文提要相对应的中文提要。

2）论文各部分的顺序：

(1)提要：中英文对应，中文在前，英文在后；提要文尾应列出论文关键词，不少于三个；提要的篇幅不少于一页。

(2)鸣谢：除向对论文有过具体指导帮助的人员致谢外，还应向论文所使用的各种文献的作者表示感谢。

(3)目录：目录应详细，可分多级标题；为便于查阅，各级标题都应包括在目录内；目录后还可列有图表清单、缩略语清单等（如果有）。

(4)正文：包括以上第1部分“论文内容”所述的各项内容。

(5)注释：可采用尾注，也可采用脚注，二者仅择其一，不必重复。

(6)参考文献：凡论文中所引用、引述、或以其他方式参考过的文献资料均应列于参考文献，应分别列出英文文献和中文文献，英文文献的排列以作者姓氏首字母为序；中文文献的排列以作者姓氏汉语拼音首字母为序。各条顺序为：姓氏、（英文姓氏后面应以逗号隔开）名字、文献名、（如系杂志，此处为杂志名，并注明第几期）出版地、出版者、出版年代。如系翻译、编辑等非原创著作，需在姓名后加括号注明。（参见附录2）

3)引文形式

所有引述如果是原话，一律使用引号（引文自身带有引号的，征引时原文引号用单引号），如果不是原话，可不使用引号，但一律在引述末尾加括号注明作者（英文作者只需注明姓氏）、原文发表年代、所在文献页码，以便与论文末尾的“参考文献”互为参照，明确出处。（参见附录3）

4)字数要求：论文应不少于二万英文词，按本规范要求的字号行距排定后，总篇幅应在六十页左右。

5)定义：如果使用术语和缩略语较多，并且在论文中使用这些词语的某一规定性意义，可先将这些术语和缩略语定义或释义。

6)图表：如需使用图示、表格，可插在正文提及该图表的地方。两个图表以上须编号：如表1、表2……；图1、图2……。如图表过大、过多，且仅用作参考，可作为附录集中置于文尾。

3排版格式

1)封面

封面上的字一律用黑体中文宋体字书写，从上至下依次是：（1）对外经济贸易大学硕士学位论文、（2）论文标题、（3）专业、（4）研究方向、（5）作者、（6）导师、（7）写作时间（指论文写作的起止时间）、（8）对外经济贸易大学英语学院。论文标题视字数多寡选择字号，其余字号应不大于三号字（参见附录4）。紧接封面的一页应为封面的对应英文，在格式上除上述第（2）项以外，其余各项可不必完全对应。

2)格式

(1)标题：各级标题一律用黑体字。一级标题居中，二级以下各标题左对齐。

(2)正文：正文左右两边都对齐。

(3)页码：页码一律居中。

(4)字号字体：除封面外，论文应使用英文TimesNewRoman11号字体或其他正楷11号字，不可使用花体字；书名、文献名等作品名称应使用斜体字。注解用9号以下字体。

(5)行距：正文行距1.5倍。

(6)段落格式：

段落格式可分首行左对齐和首行缩进两种：如果采用首行左对齐格式，各段之间空一行；如果采用首行缩进格式，则各段之间不空行。为节省篇幅，建议论文采用首行缩进格式。

凡本文未包括事项，请参照“MLA格式指南及学术出版准则”第 二版（上海外语教育出版社，20__）、“PublicationManual,APA”最新版，以及一般英文论文写作惯例。

附录1-开题报告范例(仅供参考)

ThesisProposal

FunctionandAlicationofDescriptiveTralationStudies

By________________

Date:________________

FunctionandAlicationofDescriptiveTralationStudies

1Introduction

TheintentionofthisstudyistoexplorepoibleadvantagesofDescriptiveTralationStudiesasinitsalicationintralationpracticeandtralationanalysis.

Sinceearly20thcentury,tralationstudiesgraduallybrokeawayfromthemarginalstatuswithinotherrelateddisciplinesandestablisheditselfasanempiricalscience.Fromthenon,schoolsofthoughthavekeptcomingoutandeachclaimsitslegitimacyforexistence.AmongtheseschoolsisDescriptiveTralationStudies(DTS).

DTSaroachestralationfromanempiricalperective.Tralationisviewedtobeasocialactivityhavingsignificantimportanceinthereceivingcultureandforthetargetcommunity.Therefore,tralationisdealtwithbeyondthelinguisticrealizationandlanguagecomparison,andisincorporatedinsocialandculturalcontext.

MyattentionwasfirstdirectedtoDTSbyitspeculiarcharacteristicofoervation,descriptionandexplanation.Thesubjectiswhateverhaeintralationpractice,fromthedeterminationofproectivefunctionoftralationtotheproceoftralator’schoiceofstrategies,braitormingandtherevision,tothefinalproductmakingaearanceinthetargetcommunity.

ThemethodofDTSisbasicallydescriptive.Theprescriptivetendencyandtheproblem-solutionpatternisabandoned.Tralationphenomenaarenoteddown.Withaccumulateddata,someunderlyingtruthsabouttralationwillcomeoutwhichwillprovetobeitructivenotonlyfortheoreticalprobebutalsoforaliedtralationpractice.Iwillalythisdescriptivemethodinthecasestudyofthisthesis.

AconvenienttoolhasbeensetuptoconductDTS.“Norm”isoperativeateverystageofdescriptionandexplanation.Function,proceandproductandtheirrelatiohipaswellareskeletalstructureofwhatcotitutedescriptivestudies.Tralationphenomenaareaccountedforwiththehelpofnorm.

ThecasetakeninthisthesisistheChineseclaicTheDreamofRedMaio.TwoEnglishversiotralatedreectivelybyYangHsien-yiandDavidHawksarecomparedandoervatioaremadeinregardtotheirtralationaroaches.

Inthisregard,myoervatioarelimitedtoseveralaects,Ihopein-depthoervationandexplanationwilldoneinlightofDTS.

2Outline

2.1DevelopmentandmajorconceptsofDTS

InthispartIwilldescribeHolms’basicmapofDTSandtherelatiohipbetweenfunction,proceandproduct.Iwillalsodiscusomeimportantconceptssuchaseudo-tralation,multipletralation,tralationese,normetc.

2.2Methodolgy

IwillinthispartdiscuthemethodologyofDTSbeforeIalythesametothecasestudyinthisthesiswithemphasistobeplacedonsemioticaroachandtheconceptnorm.

2.3DTSincontrasttoothertheories

AcontraststudywillbeconductedherewiththeobjectivetofindthedifferenceofDTSfromothertheoriessuchasequivalencetheoryandtheChineseXinDaYacriteria.Someadvantagewillpoiblybeshowninthisstudy.

2.4Casestudy

Inthispart,tralationofTheDreamofRedMaio(alsotralatedasTheStoryofTheStone)willbeunderinvestigationinlightofDTS.Tralationsamplestobequotedherewillbeselectedatrandom.

2.5Conclusion

BasedontheaboveelaborationofDTSandthecasestudy,poibleconclusionwillbeontheadvantageofDTSinecificstudyoftralation.Suggestioonfurtherresearcheffortswillbemadealso.

(Note:Whilethetopicwillremainthesame,theabovearrangementofcontentsissubjecttochangeintheproceofwriting.)

000

附录2-引文范例(仅供参考)

“Itistherefo repointletotrytomakeTCmorescientificthanisseibleinviewofitscomplexsubject-matterandavailablemethods.Tralatingisamental,multi-factorialactivitywhichcaotexhaustivelybeinvestigatedwithinalinguisticframeworkignoringthepersonofthetralator.”(Wil,1982:217)

‘“噢，这就是恐水病吧？你们贵族圈子怎么流行起这种病来啦？真够呛的！费芬斯小姐，您喝点茶大概没关系吧！”’（张南峰，1990：59-60）

附录3-参考文献范例(仅供参考)

Wil,Wolfram.TheScienceofTralation–ProblemsandMethods.GunterNarrVerlagTubingen,1982.

Newmark,Peter.ATextbookofTralation.NewYork:PrenticeHall,1988.

Delabastita,Dirk.TralatingPu:AfalseOositioninTralationStudies.Target,1991(3:2):137-152.

张南峰（译）.王尔德戏剧选.福州：海峡文艺出版社，1990.

戴炜栋.构建具有中国特色的英语教学“一条龙”体系，外语教学与研究，20__（5）.

附录4-封面范例(仅供参考)（中文）

对外经济贸易大学硕士学位论文

论品牌名称翻译的特殊性

专业：

研究方向：

作者：

导师：

写作时间：—

对外经济贸易大学

英语学院

（英文）

SchoolofInternationalStudies

UniversityofInternationalBusineandEconomics

PragmaticStrategies

inAdvertising:Implicatures

WangYing

AthesissubmittedtoSchoolofInternationalStudiesof

UniversityofInternationalBusineandEconomics

英语硕士论文篇4

EE6442 Assignment 3

Fan Zhang

University of Limerick

MEng. Computer and Communication Systems

ID: 0526401

Abstract: I am a video game fan, but not an addict. Since this topic attracted me a lot, I decided to choose this one as my topic for the third assignment of Processor Architecture Module. I started to play video games since I was five. While I was playing games, I found the game console itself just like a mystery, how could they react our actions to the controller then reflects so amazing pictures on TV? Although I have read a lot about it in game magazines, I admit that I didn’t try to find the answer until I found this topic. This is a great chance for me to answer the question myself. At the same time, I want to present you this paper, which should be fun.

This paper concerns the differences of architecture between PC and PlayStation 2. Since the purposes of PC and PlayStation 2 are different (or maybe I should say the purposes of PC include that of PlayStation 2), the different objectives decide the different design orientation. I think PlayStation 2 is a good game console for the comparison. First, a lot of documentations about PlayStation 2’s Emotion Engine can be found in the Internet. Second, as far as I know, PlayStation 2’s design has straightforward purposes: 3D games and multimedia, which makes the game console is seemed to be born for these two reasons. Contrasts to PlayStation, current PCs do very well on these two aspects, but the cost is the unstoppable upgrade of hardware. PlayStation 2 is a product born 5 years ago. Today tens of millions of people are still enjoy PlayStation games at home. 5-year-old PCs have been washed out already.

Keywords: PC, processor, video card, system controller, bus, Emotion Engine, Vector Unit, Graphics Synthesize.

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 The evolution of game performance

The computer technology has achieved rapid evolution this year. From Figure 1.1 to Figure 1.5 you can see, in almost twenty years, how great changes of game performance are, both PC and game consoles.

Figure 1.1: Final Fantasy I (FC) 1987 by SQUARE

Figure 1.2: Final Fantasy XII (PlayStation 2) 2006 by SQUARE ENIX

Figure 1.3: Prince of Persia (PC) 1989 by Broderbund

Figure 1.4 Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones (PC) 2006 by Ubisoft

The screenshots above are the evidences of technique developments. In these twenty years, computers are almost 10 times faster than in the 1980’s. The cost of buying a computer is decreasing simultaneously. However, the development orientations of both PC and game consoles didn’t change much during these 20 years. Here I want to say game consoles and PC are different, although they both can be classified to ‘computer’ class, although PC includes all game consoles’ functions (but the software are not compatible each other). The differences include many areas, the architecture, the media, the software producing and selling model, and the customers.

1.2 Why they are different?

I would rather to say it is because of the distinct purposes. Of course PC can play games, can do anything that game consoles do, and in the present, PlayStation 2, the most famous game console in the world, can connect to Internet, can print paper, even can run complete Linux operating system, but PC is general purpose, this means PC should care too much things, and be good at almost everything. For instance, PC should be good at text processing , games, printing, Internet connection, a huge amount of protocols are settled for it; PC also need to compatible with all components and software that are designed and implemented by current standards. But game consoles are different. They need only care about games, which mean most designs are flexible. At the same time, the standards which PC has to obey do not affect it at all. No extra cost, no burden, only focus on games.

Figure 1.5: Sony’s PlayStation 2

1.3 Multimedia

From later 20th century, multimedia has become one of the main purposes of PC. Corresponding new technology for enhancing the capability of multimedia processing on PC has been developed as well. However, the reality of transmission speed bottleneck hasn’t been changed much. Keith Diefendorff and Pradeep K. Dubey published an article named “How Multimedia workloads will change Processor Design” in 1996. They argued the dynamic media processing would be a big challenge for current processor architecture. They also thought it will force the fundamental changes in processor design.

Before Pentium 4, the processors shared the same character: their data cache memory was big, but instruction cache memory was relatively small. It was quite useful for most usage, for instance, word editor, e-business, stock information processing, and so on. However, Diefendorff did not think it is useful, or efficient enough for multimedia processing, for multimedia data come and forth constantly, no need to settle a huge bulk of storage space for holding the information that rarely has chance of reuse. Contrarily, multimedia processing requires more calculation than others. So, for multimedia calculation, the instruction cache memory should become larger, both caches require faster transmission speed as well. We shall see this prediction has realized much in both Pentium 4 and PlayStation 2.

1.4 The purpose and the brief layout of the article

This paper is mainly talk about the architectural differences between PC and PlayStation 2, which is the most famous game console in the world. The article will discuss several aspects, the whole architecture, the CPU, the motherboard, and the graphics. In the following section, the whole architectures are compared. Two processors, Intel’s Pentium 4 and PlayStation 2’s Emotion Engine are discussed and compared in the third section. The fourth section is about the bus and caching comparison. The fifth section mainly talks about PC and PlayStation 2’s graphic devices, Video card and Graphics Synthesizer. The conclusion will be made in the last section.

2. WHOLE ARCHITECTURE COMPARISON

2.1 PC architecture

The basis of PC could root back to 1940’s. John von Neumann (1903-57), who constructed a very basis structure of computer, stayed his name in the history forever. The architecture of modern PC is still based mainly on his architecture. Let’s see a diagram of PC architecture as our basis of illustrating how PC works for game performance in the future.

Figure 2.1: PC architecture--------------------------------->

Different regions in the diagram have different clock speed. We can see the system controller is the heart of whole PC system. It carries data between processor and other components in PC over bridge. The bridge is used to connect interfaces and buses. Two kinds of bridges exist in PC, North Bridge (the system controller) and south bridge (the bus bridge). The system controller provides an interface between the processor and external devices, both memory and I/O. The system controller works with the processor to perform bus cycles.

From the diagram we can see, the system controller makes the whole diagram to be complicated. This is because the system controller has to adjust the bus cycles between the processor and the external device that it wants to access. Briefly, the PC’s working procedure can be described as follow:

PC executes commandsèaccess data with the help of system controllerèreturns the execution resultèexecute commandsè…

System controller also possesses the function of controlling DMA (Direct Memory Access), which is the ability to transfer data between memory and I/O without processor intervention.

2.2 PlayStation 2 Overview

Let’s first see the architecture of PlayStation 2.

Figure 2.2: the architecture of PlayStation 2---------------->

PlayStation 2 is composed of a graphics synthesizer, the Emotion Engine, the I/O Processor (IOP), and a Sound Processor Unit (SPU). The IOP controls peripheral devices such as controller and disk drive and detect controller input, which is sent to the Emotional Engine. According to this signal, the Emotional Engine updates the internal virtual world of the game program within the video frame rate. Many physical equations need to be solved to determine the behavior of the character in the game world. After this is determined, the calculated object position is transformed according to the viewpoint, and a drawing command sequence (display list) is generated. When the graphics synthesizer receives the display list, it draws the primitive shape based on connected triangles on the frame buffer. The contents of the frame buffer are then converted from digital to analogue, and the video image appears on the TV. Finally, the Sound Processor is in charge of sound card thing, it outputs 3D digital sound using AC-3 and DTS. This is the overview of PlayStation 2 working procedure.

2.3 Comparison

Compare Figure 2.1 and Figure 2.2, we can see that the PC’s architecture is far more complex than that of PlayStation 2’s. There are many reasons. PC has more devices has to care. For instance, PlayStation’s I/O processor, which is act as the same role as the system controller bus in PC, the chief responsibility of this chip is to manage the different devices attached to the PS2. 2 PlayStation controller port, and MagicGate-compatible memory card interface, 2 USB ports, and a full-speed 400Mbps IEEE 1394 port, which are much less than PC. The other main reason is processor’s speed increased much faster than other devices; the devices themselves had uneven speed increments as well. In general, PlayStation 2 has simpler architecture and less components and devices.

3. ALL ABOUT PROCESSORS

3.1 Pentium 4 Processor

Pentium 4 adopts Intel’s 7th generation architecture. We can see in detail from the diagram below. Since the birthday of PlayStation 2 waiting for exploring was 4th March 2000, when Pentium 4 was not published yet. It is unfair to PlayStation 2. However, Pentium 4 is the (文秘站:)most popular processor in the present, and PlayStation 2 is globally the most popular game console, whatever.

Figure 3.1: Pentium 4 processor architecture

Since the previous generation architecture (Pentium III) Intel began to use hybrid CISC/RISC architecture. The processor has to accept CISC instructions, because it has to be compatible with all current software (most software is written using CISC instructions). However, Pentium 4 processes RISC-like instructions, but its front-end accepts only CISC x86 instructions. A decoder is in charge of the translation. Intel doesn’t create the path for programs using pure RISC instructions.

CISC instructions are rather complex, decoding one may cost several clock cycles. In Pentium III era, once a CISC instruction needed to be processed several times (i.e. a small loop), the decoder had to decode the instruction again and again. In Pentium 4 this situation has been improved by replacing Pentium III’s L1 instruction cache to Trace Cache, which is placed behind the decoder. The trace cache ensures that the processor pipeline is continuously fed with instructions, decoupling the execution path from a possible stall-threat of the decoder units. After decoding stage, Intel introduces the Renamer/Allocator unit to change the name and contents of 32-bit CISC instructions of the registers used by the program into one of the 128 internal registers available, allowing the instruction to run at the same time of another instruction that uses the exact same standard register, or even out-of-order, i.e. this allows the second instruction to run before the first instruction even if they mess with the same register.

The other big advance of Pentium 4 is its SSE2 - The New Double Precision Streaming SIMD Extensions. 128-bit SIMD package offers 144 strong instructions. Intel prepares two SIMD instruction units for Pentium 4 (64-bit each), one for instructions, and the other for data. Let’s recall Section 1.3, Pentium 4’s 128-bit SIMD extension is Intel’s efforts for meeting the future requirements for multimedia implementations. Because of that, video, games implementation capability gained the drastic enforcement.

Pentium 4’s pipeline is the most disputable place. When it was announced, 20-stage pipeline surprised a lot of people. Intel did so because the more stage pipeline can increase the clock rate of processor. However, once the pipeline does not contain the information what processor need, the pipeline refill-time is going to be a long wait. In fact, Pentium 4 is only faster than Pentium III because it works at a higher clock rate. Under the same clock rate, a Pentium III CPU would be faster than a Pentium 4.

Figure 3.2: Pentium 4 Pipeline

The scheduler is a heart of out-of-order engine in Pentium 4. It organizes and dispatches all microinstructions (in other words, uops) into specialized order for execution engines.

Figure 3.3: Pentium 4 scheduler

Four kinds of schedulers deal with different kinds of microinstructions for keeping the processor busy all the time. The ports are Pentium 4’s dispatch ports. If you read the diagram carefully, you can see Port 1 and Port 0 each is assigned a floating-point microinstruction, Port 0 is assigned Simple FP Scheduler (contains simple Floating-point microinstructions) and Port 1 is assigned Slow / Floating Point Scheduler (contains complex floating-point microinstructions). Port 0 and Port 1 also accept the microinstructions came from Fast Scheduler. For the floating point microinstruction may run several clock cycles, Pentium 4’s scheduler monitor decides to transfer the microinstruction to Port 1 if Port 0 is busy, and vice versa. Port 2 is in charge of Load microinstructions and Port 3 deals with Store microinstructions.

3.2 PlayStation 2’s Emotion Engine

PlayStation 2’s designers focus deeply on the purpose of 3D games. At the same time, they had to ensure it was completely compatible with DVD video. For per forming 3D games well, PlayStation 2 has to possess perfect vision and audio functions. Emotion Engine acts as the role of Geometry calculator (transforms, translations, etc), Behavior/World simulator (enemy AI, calculating the friction between two objects, calculating the height of a wave on a pond, etc). It also in charge of a secondary job of Misc. functions (program control, housekeeping, etc). In general, Emotion Engine is the combination of CPU and DSP processor.

Figure 3.4: The architecture of Emotion Engine

The basic architecture of Emotion Engine is show in Figure 14. The units are composed of

(1) MIPS III CPU core

(2) Vector Unit (two vector units, VU0 and VU1)

(3) Floating-Point Coprocessor (FPU)

(4) Image Processing Unit (IPU)

(5) 10-channel DMA controller

(6) Graphics Interface Unit (GIF)

(7) RDRAM interface and I/O interface.

Something interesting in the diagram you may have noticed. First, inside the Emotion Engine, there is a main bus connects all components for data communication. However, between MIP III core and FPU, VU0 and MIP III, VU1 and GIF, there are dedicate 128-bit buses connect them. Second, VU0 and VU1 have certain relationship shown in the diagram. This design extremely enhanced the flexibility of programming with Emotion Engine.

MIPS III Core connects with the FPU and VU0 directly with the dedicated buses. The pipeline of MIPS III is 6-stage. The MIPS III is the primary and controlling part, VU0 and the FPU are coprocessors to MIPS III. They compute the behavior and emotion of synthesis, physical calculations, etc For example, in a football game, the flying orbits of the ball, the wind effect, the friction between ball and the ground need to be calculated. At the same time, 21 player’s AI needs to be implemented (the last player is controlled by the user), the activity, the lineup, etc. After the calculation, MIPS III core sends out the display list to GIF.

VU1 has a dedicated 128-bit bus connected to GIF, which is the interface between GS (Graphics Synthesizer) and EE (Emotion Engine). VU1 can independently generate display list and send to GIF via its dedicated bus. Both of these relationships forms a kind of dedicate and flexible structure. The final goal of EE is generating display list and send to GS. The programmer can choose either programming two groups (MIPSIII + FPU + VU0 and VU1 + GIF) separately, send their display list in parallel, or programming purposely, making MIPS III + FPU + VU0 group as the “coprocessor” of VU1, for instance, generate physical and AI information then send to VU1, VU1 then produces corresponding display list. The diagram below shows the two programming methods.

(a) (b)

Figure 3.5: Two programming methods of Emotion Engine

MIPS ISA is an industry standard RISC ISA that found in applications almost everywhere. Sony’s MIPS III implementation is a 2-issue design that supports multimedia instruction set enhancements. It has

(1) 32, 128-bit general purpose registers

(2) 2, 64-bit integer ALUs

(3) 1 Branch Execution Unit

(4) 1 FPU coprocessor (COP1)

(5) 1 vector coprocessor (COP2)

What I really want to cover are two vector processors, VU0 and VU1. This is the main reason why PlayStation 2 is powerful.

VU0 is a 128-bit SIMD/VLIW design. The main jo b of VU0 is acting as the coprocessor of MIPS III. It is a powerful Floating-point co-processor; deal with the complex computation of emotion synthesis and physical calculation.

The instruction set of VU0 is just 32-bit MIPS COP instructions. But it is mixed with integer, FPU, and branch instructions. VIF is in charge of unpacking the floating-point data in the main bus to 4 * 32 words (w, x, y, z) for processing by FMAC. VU0 also possesses 32 128-bit floating-point registers and 16 16-bit integers.

VU0 is pretty strong. It is equipped with 4 FMACs, 1 FDIV, 1 LSU, 1 ALU and 1 random number generator. FMAC can do the Floating-Point Multiply Accumulate calculation and Minimum / Maximum in 1 cycle; FDIV can do the Floating-Point Divide in 7 cycles, Square Root in 7 cycles, and Inverse Square Root in 13 cycles. In fact, as the coprocessor of MIPS III, VU0 only uses its four FMACs. However, VU0 doesn’t have to stay in coprocessor mode all the time. It can operate in VLIW mode (as a MIPS III coprocessor, VU0 only takes 32-bit instructions. In VILW mode, the instruction can be extended to 64-bit long). By calling a micro-subroutine of VLIW code. In this case, it splits the 64-bit instruction it takes into two 32-bit MIPS COP2 instructions, and executes them in parallel, just like VU1.

VU1 has very similar architecture than VU0. The diagram below is the architecture of VU1 possesses all function that VU0 has, plus some enhancement. First, VU1 is a fully independent SIMD/VLIW processor and deal with geometry processing. Second, VU1 has stronger capability than VU0: it has a 16K bytes’ instruction memory and a 16K bytes’ data memory, which VU0 only has 4K bytes each. VU1 acts as the role of geometry processor; it burdens more instructions and data to be computed. Third, VU1 has three different paths to lead its way to GIF. It can transmit the display list from 128-bit main bus, just as VU0 + CPU + FPU do; or it can transmit via the direct 128-bit bus between its VIF and GIF; the last one is quite interesting, the path comes out from the lower execution unit (which I will talk about later) and goes directly to GIF. Three individual paths ensure two main problems of PC 3D game programming will not happen: first, the bottleneck of bus bandwidth; second, the simplex way of programming.

Figure 3.6: The architecture of VU1

VU1’s VIF does much more than that of VU0 does. The VIF takes and parses in which Sony called 3D display list. The 3D display list constructs of two types of data: the VU1 programming instructions (which goes to Instruction memory) and the data that the instruction deal with (which goes to Data memory). The instruction itself can be divided into two units, Upper instruction and Lower Instruction, which directly operate on two different execution units, Upper execution unit and Lower execution unit. The 64-bit VLIW instruction can be used to deal with two operations in parallel. Recall that VU0 possesses the same function but most of time it acts only as the coprocessor of MIPS III, this mode can only operate 32-bit SIMD instructions. Programmers also rarely ask VU0 to do the same thing what VU1 is good at.

3.3 Comparison

I strongly agree if you think Emotion Engine is more flexible than Pentium 4. The design of Emotion Engine is completely around the performance of 3D games. Two vector units, VU0 and VU1, contribute a lot for the game performance. Pentium 4 architecture is straight, you can trace the path of data from the very beginning, and soon you will be able to know how P entium 4 works easily. For Emotion Engine, except you are the game designer, you will never know exactly.

I did not put too much digits in this section, the comparison of digits does not make sense at all. The comparison between two PC processors depends on digits, because they are the same kind and work in the same situation. For game consoles, without the burden of compatibility, the designers think a lot for the perfect cooperation. This would results in better performance, plus less cost. Unfortunately the programmers don’t think it is a good idea, it cost them quite a lot of time to investigate the processor to figure how it works.

4. BUSES AND CACHEING

4.1 PC Motherboard

While multimedia processing requires massive quantities of data to move rapidly throughout the system, the speed difference between processor and external devices is the main bottleneck of PC. Processor companies like Intel have put a lot of energy into getting the rest of the system components to run faster, even if other vendors provide these components. Improving the performance of motherboard is a good idea. Figure 4.1 is the main structure diagram of GIGABYTE GA-8TRX330-L Pentium 4 Motherboard. The bandwidth between Processor and system controller, main memory and system controller has reached to equally incredible 6.4GB/S. However, the latency of memory is still impossible to remove. Here I want to talk something about the processor caching mechanism.

In the present, motherboard’s FSB (Front Side Bus) frequency has over 800 megahertz. However, it is slower than that of Pentium 4, which is over 3 gigahertz. Processor runs at a multiple of the motherboard clock speed, and is closely coupled to a local SRAM cache (L1 cache). If processor requires data it will fist look at L1 cache. If it is in L1 cache, the processor read the data at a high speed and no need to do the further search. If it is not, sadly processor has to slow down to the motherboard clock speed (what a drastic brake!) and contact to system controller. System controller will check if L2 cache has the required data. If has, the data is passed to processor. If not, processor has to access the DRAM, which is a relatively slow transfer.

4.2 About PlayStation 2’s buses and caching.

Recall Figure 2.2, we can see 32-bit interfaces between processor and I/O Processor, main memory and I/O Processor, which can achieve 3.2GB/S bus speed. Although slower than Pentium 4, Emotion Engine itself is relatively slow as well, 300MHz MIPS III processor. However, PlayStation 2’s 32-bit interface, 10-channel DMAC, 128-bit internal bus, and small cache memory group to an incredible caching condition. Any data necessary can be store or download in time. This strategy takes 90% of DMA capability. It makes the latency which main memory generates is acceptable for Emotion Engine.

4.3 Comparison

This time we can talk about digits some more. Let’s see a Pentium 4’s cache memory

L1 trace cache: 150K

L1 data memory: 16K

L2 memory: 256K ~ 2MB total: 422~2204K

Let’s see PlayStation 2 next

VU0 data memory: 4K

VU0 instruction memory 4K

VU1 data memory 16K

VU1 instruction memory 16K

MIPS III data memory: 2-way 8K

MIPS III instruction memory: 2-way 16K total: 64K

Contrast to Pentium 4, the cache memory of PlayStation 2 is too small. Its capability is indeed ‘weak’ in the present. Pentium 4 is able to hold more data and does more computations in parallel. However, PC archite cture hasn’t been improved along with the processor. No matter how Pentium 4 fast is, present bus architecture is never going to perform Pentium 4 100% capability. PlayStation 2 achieves a nearly perfect structure and mechanism, which helps it exert as much as it can (or maybe I should say because Pentium 4 is too fast, the memory speed is relatively too slow). Besides, it remarkably low down the cost, you can afford a PlayStation 2 plus a controller with the same price of a single Pentium 4 chip.

5. VIDEO PERFORMANCE

5.1 Comparison of performance between PC and PlayStation 2

Figure 5.1 Need for Speed Most Wanted (PlayStation 2) 2006 by EA GAMES

PlayStation 2 Graphics Synthesizer (GS)

· 150 MHz (147.456 MHz)

· 16 Pixel Pipelines

· 2.4 Gigapixels per Second (no texture)

· 1.2 Gigatexels per Second

· Point, Bilinear, Trilinear, Anisotropic Mip-Map Filtering

· Perspective-Correct Texture Mapping

· Bump Mapping

· Environment Mapping

· 32-bit Color (RGBA)

· 32-bit Z Buffer

· 4MB Multiported Embedded DRAM

· 38.4 Gigabytes per Second eDRAM Bandwidth (19.2 GB/s in each direction)

· 9.6 Gigabytes per Second eDRAM Texture Bandwidth

· 150 Million Particles per Second

· Polygon Drawing Rate:

· 75 Million Polygons per Second (small polygon)

· 50 Million Polygons per Second (48-pixel quad with Z and Alpha)

· 30 Million Polygons per Second (50-pixel triangle with Z and Alpha)

· 25 Million Polygons per Second (48-pixel quad with Z, Alpha, and Texture)

· 18.75 Million Sprites per Second (8 x 8 pixel sprites)

Figure 5.2 Needs for Speed Most Wanted (PC) 2006 by EA GAMES

PC Graphics Chip RADEON X300 SE PCI Express

· Bus type PCI Express (x16 lanes)

· Maximum vertical refresh rate 85 Hz

· Display support Integrated 400 MHz RAMDAC

· Display max resolution 2048 x 1536

· Board configuration

· 64 MB frame buffer

· Graphics Chip RADEON X300 SE PCI Express

· Core clock 325 MHz

· Memory clock 200 MHz

· Frame buffer 64 MB DDR

· Memory I/O 64 bit

· Memory Configuration 4 pieces 8Mx16 DDR

· Board configuration

· 128 MB frame buffer

· Specification Description

· Graphics Chip RADEON X300 SE PCI Express

· Core clock 325 MHz

· Memory clock 200 MHz

· Frame buffer 128 MB DDR

· Memory I/O 64 bit

· Memory Configuration 4 pieces 16M x 16 DDR

· Memory type DDR1

· Memory 128 MB

· Operating systems support Windows? 2000, Windows XP, Linux XFree86 and .

· Core power 16 W (Max board power)

From the data we can see. GS is too weak, contrast to low-level video card of PC. However, the performance of PlayStation is not too that bad. I don’t want to analyze data here. What I am interested to discuss is about the performance itself.

Let’s see Figure 5.2 in detail. Texture is very clear and exquisite. This is what big video memory offers. The tree leaves in distance need a lot of polygons to build. The video card itself is low-level; possess no special effect for the game rendering. No refection and other sparking place can be found. In general, the game performance is only ok.

Figure 5.3 PC game rendering related architecture

Now let’s see PlayStation 2’s performance, which is in Figure 5.1. We see a good image. If you look the image in detail, y ou may found the mountain beside the road is weird: the shape of mountain is not that nature, like some spectrum graphics. This is done by VU1, which draws the Bezile, build 3D graphic based on the curve. Although not good enough, how many people will actually notice that when dashing at over 200km/h with his virtual car? VU1 does a lot of job like that and it could generate a lot of shapes without too many polygons to build. Now let’s see the car, the refection of cars is true reflection (which means it is not fake texture pretended to be the reflection), we can distinguish the mountains behind, however very blur. The whole image is not as clear as Figure 5.2 because the limitation of GS’s video memory (4M). However, this image is good enough for most PlayStation 2 players.

5.2 Some more about the video performance

Although Pentium 4 has enough capability to process image real time, the way of implementing games is still no change. The video card read the content of texture into its local memory card, the processor only deal with the data and instructions. After the calculation, the processor stores the display list (a list, recorded with the details of all elements, for instance, one single polygon’s position and texture code) back to the main memory. Video card then access the lists and process them, generate picture, transfer to analogue signal and output. Most special effects depend on the video card. So, no good card, no good performance.

Let’s see figure 2.2, we will see there is no direct connection between GS and main memory. At the PC’s point of view, 4MB video-memory is not enough to show a single frame with 1024*768 pixels. How is PlayStation 2 able to perform like that? The answer is bus. So we come back to section 4 again. The specialized display list (which Sony called 3D display list) is directly sent to GS, along with the required texture. GS has a huge bandwidth (3.8GB/S), its local memory can work as fast as it is (maybe it is more suitable if we call the memory as cache). GS itself supports only a few special effects. However, this situation can be improved by the simulation calculations finished by Emotion Engine… Again, PlayStation 2’s elegant design makes its all components work as a whole.

6. CONCLUSION

Hopefully you have got the idea of how PlayStation 2 and PC architecture differ. Let’s go through it again.

General architecture. PCs are more complex to read, but easier to implement. The system bus directly manages all devices inter-communications. PlayStation 2’s is easy to read, but much harder to implement. The communication between each other is convenient.

Processor architecture. The trend of processor architecture design is meeting the requirement of multimedia. Both PC’s Pentium 4 and PlayStation 2’s Emotion Engine are qualified to run multimedia applications efficiently. Pentium 4 is much stronger than Emotion Engine, but the architecture is very ‘straight’ and has to do extra jobs of translating instructions to be compatible with current applications. Emotion Engine has no this burden, the specialized 3D game performance design make it easy to handle complex calculation jobs with relatively low clock rate.

Buses and Caching. PC has classic bottlenecks and there is no way to overcome it. Current PC buses and cache has improved a lot by increasing the bandwidth and cache volumes, but the latency of main memory cannot be solved. PlayStation 2 works on nearly full load; perfect coordination between components is almost achieved.

Video . Although Pentium 4 can run perfectly on multimedia applications, the PC game developers don’t think so. They still stick to push the texture and other data into the video memory for one time. The awkward situation is, when you want to update your PC for high requirement games, the first component came into your mind must be the video card but processor. It is impossible to ask PlayStation 2 players to update. Emotion Engine is in charge of many jobs what PC’s video card does. The good condition of data transmission makes it is possible to implement ‘true’ multimedia processing in games, that is treating game image as media streams, no need to supply huge data storage to hold that.

Purpose: PC’s general—purpose VS PlayStation 2’s 3D game rendering purpose.

PlayStation 2 is 6 years old now. According to the principle of game console life expectance, it is time to hand the baton to its offspring, PlayStation 3. It is a successful game console of Sony. Contrast to PC, it is too weird, but all its weird compositions seemed so reasonable as well. PC’s architecture is classical; all components have its space for upgrade. Maybe it is too early to say the architecture should evolve. However, PlayStation 2’s architecture gave us a good lesson. If you only were interested in games, you should buy a PlayStation series, not a PC. At least, you need not worry about upgrading your components for the next game. Special architecture can make it becomes the best in specialized region.

7. REFERENCE

[1] William Buchanan and Austin Wilson, “Advanced PC Architecture”, ISBN: 0 201 39858 3

[2] John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson, “Computer Architecture—A Quantitative Approach”, ISBN: 1 55890 724 2

[3] Keith Diefendorff and Pradeep K. Dubey, "How Multimedia Workloads Will Change Processor Design." Computer, September 1997

[4] Jon "Hannibal" Stokes Sound and Vision: A Technical Overview of the Emotion Engine Wednesday, February 16, 2000

[5] K. Kutaragi et al "A Micro Processor with a 128b CPU, 10 Floating-Point MACs, 4 Floating-Point Dividers, and an MPEG2 Decoder," ISSCC (Int’l Solid-State Circuits Conf.) Digest of Tech. Papers,Feb. 1999, pp. 256-257.

[6] Jon "Hannibal" Stokes “SIMD architectures”

[8] “The Technology behind PlayStation 2”

[13]Howstuffworks “How PlayStation 2 Works”

/ps21.htm

[14] Craig Steffen “Scientific Computation on PlayStation 2 home page”

英语硕士论文篇5

    EE6442 Assignment 3

    Fan Zhang

    University of Limerick

    MEng. Computer and Communication Systems

    ID: 0526401

    Abstract: I am a video game fan, but not an addict. Since this topic attracted me a lot, I decided to choose this one as my topic for the third assignment of Processor Architecture Module. I started to play video games since I was five. While I was playing games, I found the game console itself just like a mystery, how could they react our actions to the controller then reflects so amazing pictures on TV? Although I have read a lot about it in game magazines, I admit that I didn’t try to find the answer until I found this topic. This is a great chance for me to answer the question myself. At the same time, I want to present you this paper, which should be fun.

    This paper concerns the differences of architecture between PC and PlayStation 2. Since the purposes of PC and PlayStation 2 are different (or maybe I should say the purposes of PC include that of PlayStation 2), the different objectives decide the different design orientation. I think PlayStation 2 is a good game console for the comparison. First, a lot of documentations about PlayStation 2’s Emotion Engine can be found in the Internet. Second, as far as I know, PlayStation 2’s design has straightforward purposes: 3D games and multimedia, which makes the game console is seemed to be born for these two reasons. Contrasts to PlayStation, current PCs do very well on these two aspects, but the cost is the unstoppable upgrade of hardware. PlayStation 2 is a product born 5 years ago. Today tens of millions of people are still enjoy PlayStation games at home. 5-year-old PCs have been washed out already.

    Keywords: PC, processor, video card, system controller, bus, Emotion Engine, Vector Unit, Graphics Synthesize.

    1. INTRODUCTION

    1.1 The evolution of game performance

    The computer technology has achieved rapid evolution this year. From Figure 1.1 to Figure 1.5 you can see, in almost twenty years, how great changes of game performance are, both PC and game consoles.

    Figure 1.1: Final Fantasy I (FC) 1987 by SQUARE

    Figure 1.2: Final Fantasy XII (PlayStation 2) 2006 by SQUARE ENIX

    Figure 1.3: Prince of Persia (PC) 1989 by Broderbund

    Figure 1.4 Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones (PC) 2006 by Ubisoft

    The screenshots above are the evidences of technique developments. In these twenty years, computers are almost 10 times faster than in the 1980’s. The cost of buying a computer is decreasing simultaneously. However, the development orientations of both PC and game consoles didn’t change much during these 20 years. Here I want to say game consoles and PC are different, although they both can be classified to ‘computer’ class, although PC includes all game consoles’ functions (but the software are not compatible each other). The differences include many areas, the architecture, the media, the software producing and selling model, and the customers.

    1.2 Why they are different?

    I would rather to say it is because of the distinct purposes. Of course PC can play games, can do anything that game consoles do, and in the present, PlayStation 2, the most famous game console in the world, can connect to Internet, can print paper, even can run complete Linux operating system, but PC is general purpose, this means PC should care too much things, and be good at almost everything. For instance, PC should be good at text processing, games, printing, Internet connection, a huge amount of protocols are settled for it; PC also need to compatible with all components and software that are designed and implemented by current standards. But game consoles are different. They need only care about games, which mean most designs are flexible. At the same time, the standards which PC has to obey do not affect it at all. No extra cost, no burden, only focus on games.

    Figure 1.5: Sony’s PlayStation 2

    1.3 Multimedia

    From later 20th century, multimedia has become one of the main purposes of PC. Corresponding new technology for enhancing the capability of multimedia processing on PC has been developed as well. However, the reality of transmission speed bottleneck hasn’t been changed much. Keith Diefendorff and Pradeep K. Dubey published an article named “How Multimedia workloads will change Processor Design” in 1996. They argued the dynamic media processing would be a big challenge for current processor architecture. They also thought it will force the fundamental changes in processor design.

    Before Pentium 4, the processors shared the same character: their data cache memory was big, but instruction cache memory was relatively small. It was quite useful for most usage, for instance, word editor, e-business, stock information processing, and so on. However, Diefendorff did not think it is useful, or efficient enough for multimedia processing, for multimedia data come and forth constantly, no need to settle a huge bulk of storage space for holding the information that rarely has chance of reuse. Contrarily, multimedia processing requires more calculation than others. So, for multimedia calculation, the instruction cache memory should become larger, both caches require faster transmission speed as well. We shall see this prediction has realized much in both Pentium 4 and PlayStation 2.

    1.4 The purpose and the brief layout of the article

    This paper is mainly talk about the architectural differences between PC and PlayStation 2, which is the most famous game console in the world. The article will discuss several aspects, the whole architecture, the CPU, the motherboard, and the graphics. In the following section, the whole architectures are compared. Two processors, Intel’s Pentium 4 and PlayStation 2’s Emotion Engine are discussed and compared in the third section. The fourth section is about the bus and caching comparison. The fifth section mainly talks about PC and PlayStation 2’s graphic devices, Video card and Graphics Synthesizer. The conclusion will be made in the last section.

    2. WHOLE ARCHITECTURE COMPARISON

    2.1 PC architecture

    The basis of PC could root back to 1940’s. John von Neumann (1903-57), who constructed a very basis structure of computer, stayed his name in the history forever. The architecture of modern PC is still based mainly on his architecture. Let’s see a diagram of PC architecture as our basis of illustrating how PC works for game performance in the future.

    Figure 2.1: PC architecture--------------------------------->

    Different regions in the diagram have different clock speed. We can see the system controller is the heart of whole PC system. It carries data between processor and other components in PC over bridge. The bridge is used to connect interfaces and buses. Two kinds of bridges exist in PC, North Bridge (the system controller) and south bridge (the bus bridge). The system controller provides an interface between the processor and external devices, both memory and I/O. The system controller works with the processor to perform bus cycles.

    From the diagram we can see, the system controller makes the whole diagram to be complicated. This is because the system controller has to adjust the bus cycles between the processor and the external device that it wants to access. Briefly, the PC’s working procedure can be described as follow:

    PC executes commandsèaccess data with the help of system controllerèreturns the execution resultèexecute commandsè…

    System controller also possesses the function of controlling DMA (Direct Memory Access), which is the ability to transfer data between memory and I/O without processor intervention.

    2.2 PlayStation 2 Overview

    Let’s first see the architecture of PlayStation 2.

    Figure 2.2: the architecture of PlayStation 2---------------->

    PlayStation 2 is composed of a graphics synthesizer, the Emotion Engine, the I/O Processor (IOP), and a Sound Processor Unit (SPU). The IOP controls peripheral devices such as controller and disk drive and detect controller input, which is sent to the Emotional Engine. According to this signal, the Emotional Engine updates the internal virtual world of the game program within the video frame rate. Many physical equations need to be solved to determine the behavior of the character in the game world. After this is determined, the calculated object position is transformed according to the viewpoint, and a drawing command sequence (display list) is generated. When the graphics synthesizer receives the display list, it draws the primitive shape based on connected triangles on the frame buffer. The contents of the frame buffer are then converted from digital to analogue, and the video image appears on the TV. Finally, the Sound Processor is in charge of sound card thing, it outputs 3D digital sound using AC-3 and DTS. This is the overview of PlayStation 2 working procedure.

    2.3 Comparison

    Compare Figure 2.1 and Figure 2.2, we can see that the PC’s architecture is far more complex than that of PlayStation 2’s. There are many reasons. PC has more devices has to care. For instance, PlayStation’s I/O processor, which is act as the same role as the system controller bus in PC, the chief responsibility of this chip is to manage the different devices attached to the PS2. 2 PlayStation controller port, and MagicGate-compatible memory card interface, 2 USB ports, and a full-speed 400Mbps IEEE 1394 port, which are much less than PC. The other main reason is processor’s speed increased much faster than other devices; the devices themselves had uneven speed increments as well. In general, PlayStation 2 has simpler architecture and less components and devices.

    3. ALL ABOUT PROCESSORS

    3.1 Pentium 4 Processor

    Pentium 4 adopts Intel’s 7th generation architecture. We can see in detail from the diagram below. Since the birthday of PlayStation 2 waiting for exploring was 4th March 2000, when Pentium 4 was not published yet. It is unfair to PlayStation 2. However, Pentium 4 is the most popular processor in the present, and PlayStation 2 is globally the most popular game console, whatever.

    Figure 3.1: Pentium 4 processor architecture

    Since the previous generation architecture (Pentium III) Intel began to use hybrid CISC/RISC architecture. The processor has to accept CISC instructions, because it has to be compatible with all current software (most software is written using CISC instructions). However, Pentium 4 processes RISC-like instructions, but its front-end accepts only CISC x86 instructions. A decoder is in charge of the translation. Intel doesn’t create the path for programs using pure RISC instructions.

    CISC instructions are rather complex, decoding one may cost several clock cycles. In Pentium III era, once a CISC instruction needed to be processed several times (i.e. a small loop), the decoder had to decode the instruction again and again. In Pentium 4 this situation has been improved by replacing Pentium III’s L1 instruction cache to Trace Cache, which is placed behind the decoder. The trace cache ensures that the processor pipeline is continuously fed with instructions, decoupling the execution path from a possible stall-threat of the decoder units. After decoding stage, Intel introduces the Renamer/Allocator unit to change the name and contents of 32-bit CISC instructions of the registers used by the program into one of the 128 internal registers available, allowing the instruction to run at the same time of another instruction that uses the exact same standard register, or even out-of-order, i.e. this allows the second instruction to run before the first instruction even if they mess with the same register.

    The other big advance of Pentium 4 is its SSE2 - The New Double Precision Streaming SIMD Extensions. 128-bit SIMD package offers 144 strong instructions. Intel prepares two SIMD instruction units for Pentium 4 (64-bit each), one for instructions, and the other for data. Let’s recall Section 1.3, Pentium 4’s 128-bit SIMD extension is Intel’s efforts for meeting the future requirements for multimedia implementations. Because of that, video, games implementation capability gained the drastic enforcement.

    Pentium 4’s pipeline is the most disputable place. When it was announced, 20-stage pipeline surprised a lot of people. Intel did so because the more stage pipeline can increase the clock rate of processor. However, once the pipeline does not contain the information what processor need, the pipeline refill-time is going to be a long wait. In fact, Pentium 4 is only faster than Pentium III because it works at a higher clock rate. Under the same clock rate, a Pentium III CPU would be faster than a Pentium 4.

    Figure 3.2: Pentium 4 Pipeline

    The scheduler is a heart of out-of-order engine in Pentium 4. It organizes and dispatches all microinstructions (in other words, uops) into specialized order for execution engines.

    Figure 3.3: Pentium 4 scheduler

    Four kinds of schedulers deal with different kinds of microinstructions for keeping the processor busy all the time. The ports are Pentium 4’s dispatch ports. If you read the diagram carefully, you can see Port 1 and Port 0 each is assigned a floating-point microinstruction, Port 0 is assigned Simple FP Scheduler (contains simple Floating-point microinstructions) and Port 1 is assigned Slow / Floating Point Scheduler (contains complex floating-point microinstructions). Port 0 and Port 1 also accept the microinstructions came from Fast Scheduler. For the floating point microinstruction may run several clock cycles, Pentium 4’s scheduler monitor decides to transfer the microinstruction to Port 1 if Port 0 is busy, and vice versa. Port 2 is in charge of Load microinstructions and Port 3 deals with Store microinstructions.

    3.2 PlayStation 2’s Emotion Engine

    PlayStation 2’s designers focus deeply on the purpose of 3D games. At the same time, they had to ensure it was completely compatible with DVD video. For performing 3D games well, PlayStation 2 has to possess perfect vision and audio functions. Emotion Engine acts as the role of Geometry calculator (transforms, translations, etc), Behavior/World simulator (enemy AI, calculating the friction between two objects, calculating the height of a wave on a pond, etc). It also in charge of a secondary job of Misc. functions (program control, housekeeping, etc). In general, Emotion Engine is the combination of CPU and DSP processor.

    Figure 3.4: The architecture of Emotion Engine

    The basic architecture of Emotion Engine is show in Figure 14. The units are composed of

    (1) MIPS III CPU core

    (2) Vector Unit (two vector units, VU0 and VU1)

    (3) Floating-Point Coprocessor (FPU)

    (4) Image Processing Unit (IPU)

    (5) 10-channel DMA controller

    (6) Graphics Interface Unit (GIF)

    (7) RDRAM interface and I/O interface.

    Something interesting in the diagram you may have noticed. First, inside the Emotion Engine, there is a main bus connects all components for data communication. However, between MIP III core and FPU, VU0 and MIP III, VU1 and GIF, there are dedicate 128-bit buses connect them. Second, VU0 and VU1 have certain relationship shown in the diagram. This design extremely enhanced the flexibility of programming with Emotion Engine.

    MIPS III Core connects with the FPU and VU0 directly with the dedicated buses. The pipeline of MIPS III is 6-stage. The MIPS III is the primary and controlling part, VU0 and the FPU are coprocessors to MIPS III. They compute the behavior and emotion of synthesis, physical calculations, etc For example, in a football game, the flying orbits of the ball, the wind effect, the friction between ball and the ground need to be calculated. At the same time, 21 player’s AI needs to be implemented (the last player is controlled by the user), the activity, the lineup, etc. After the calculation, MIPS III core sends out the display list to GIF.

    VU1 has a dedicated 128-bit bus connected to GIF, which is the interface between GS (Graphics Synthesizer) and EE (Emotion Engine). VU1 can independently generate display list and send to GIF via its dedicated bus. Both of these relationships forms a kind of dedicate and flexible structure. The final goal of EE is generating display list and send to GS. The programmer can choose either programming two groups (MIPSIII + FPU + VU0 and VU1 + GIF) separately, send their display list in parallel, or programming purposely, making MIPS III + FPU + VU0 group as the “coprocessor” of VU1, for instance, generate physical and AI information then send to VU1, VU1 then produces corresponding display list. The diagram below shows the two programming methods.

    (a)                                                       (b)

    Figure 3.5: Two programming methods of Emotion Engine

    MIPS ISA is an industry standard RISC ISA that found in applications almost everywhere. Sony’s MIPS III implementation is a 2-issue design that supports multimedia instruction set enhancements. It has

    (1) 32, 128-bit general purpose registers

    (2) 2, 64-bit integer ALUs

    (3) 1 Branch Execution Unit

    (4) 1 FPU coprocessor (COP1)

    (5) 1 vector coprocessor (COP2)

    What I really want to cover are two vector processors, VU0 and VU1. This is the main reason why PlayStation 2 is powerful.

    VU0 is a 128-bit SIMD/VLIW design. The main job of VU0 is acting as the coprocessor of MIPS III. It is a powerful Floating-point co-processor; deal with the complex computation of emotion synthesis and physical calculation.

    The instruction set of VU0 is just 32-bit MIPS COP instructions. But it is mixed with integer, FPU, and branch instructions. VIF is in charge of unpacking the floating-point data in the main bus to 4 * 32 words (w, x, y, z) for processing by FMAC. VU0 also possesses 32 128-bit floating-point registers and 16 16-bit integers.

    VU0 is pretty strong. It is equipped with 4 FMACs, 1 FDIV, 1 LSU, 1 ALU and 1 random number generator. FMAC can do the Floating-Point Multiply Accumulate calculation and Minimum / Maximum in 1 cycle; FDIV can do the Floating-Point Divide in 7 cycles, Square Root in 7 cycles, and Inverse Square Root in 13 cycles. In fact, as the coprocessor of MIPS III, VU0 only uses its four FMACs. However, VU0 doesn’t have to stay in coprocessor mode all the time. It can operate in VLIW mode (as a MIPS III coprocessor, VU0 only takes 32-bit instructions. In VILW mode, the instruction can be extended to 64-bit long). By calling a micro-subroutine of VLIW code. In this case, it splits the 64-bit instruction it takes into two 32-bit MIPS COP2 instructions, and executes them in parallel, just like VU1.

    VU1 has very similar architecture than VU0. The diagram below is the architecture of VU1 possesses all function that VU0 has, plus some enhancement. First, VU1 is a fully independent SIMD/VLIW processor and deal with geometry processing. Second, VU1 has stronger capability than VU0: it has a 16K bytes’ instruction memory and a 16K bytes’ data memory, which VU0 only has 4K bytes each. VU1 acts as the role of geometry processor; it burdens more instructions and data to be computed. Third, VU1 has three different paths to lead its way to GIF. It can transmit the display list from 128-bit main bus, just as VU0 + CPU + FPU do; or it can transmit via the direct 128-bit bus between its VIF and GIF; the last one is quite interesting, the path comes out from the lower execution unit (which I will talk about later) and goes directly to GIF. Three individual paths ensure two main problems of PC 3D game programming will not happen: first, the bottleneck of bus bandwidth; second, the simplex way of programming.

    Figure 3.6: The architecture of VU1

    VU1’s VIF does much more than that of VU0 does. The VIF takes and parses in which Sony called 3D display list. The 3D display list constructs of two types of data: the VU1 programming instructions (which goes to Instruction memory) and the data that the instruction deal with (which goes to Data memory). The instruction itself can be divided into two units, Upper instruction and Lower Instruction, which directly operate on two different execution units, Upper execution unit and Lower execution unit. The 64-bit VLIW instruction can be used to deal with two operations in parallel. Recall that VU0 possesses the same function but most of time it acts only as the coprocessor of MIPS III, this mode can only operate 32-bit SIMD instructions. Programmers also rarely ask VU0 to do the same thing what VU1 is good at.

    3.3 Comparison

    I strongly agree if you think Emotion Engine is more flexible than Pentium 4. The design of Emotion Engine is completely around the performance of 3D games. Two vector units, VU0 and VU1, contribute a lot for the game performance. Pentium 4 architecture is straight, you can trace the path of data from the very beginning, and soon you will be able to know how Pentium 4 works easily. For Emotion Engine, except you are the game designer, you will never know exactly.

    I did not put too much digits in this section, the comparison of digits does not make sense at all. The comparison between two PC processors depends on digits, because they are the same kind and work in the same situation. For game consoles, without the burden of compatibility, the designers think a lot for the perfect cooperation. This would results in better performance, plus less cost. Unfortunately the programmers don’t think it is a good idea, it cost them quite a lot of time to investigate the processor to figure how it works.

    4. BUSES AND CACHEING

    4.1 PC Motherboard

    While multimedia processing requires massive quantities of data to move rapidly throughout the system, the speed difference between processor and external devices is the main bottleneck of PC. Processor companies like Intel have put a lot of energy into getting the rest of the system components to run faster, even if other vendors provide these components. Improving the performance of motherboard is a good idea. Figure 4.1 is the main structure diagram of GIGABYTE GA-8TRX330-L Pentium 4 Motherboard. The bandwidth between Processor and system controller, main memory and system controller has reached to equally incredible 6.4GB/S. However, the latency of memory is still impossible to remove. Here I want to talk something about the processor caching mechanism.

    In the present, motherboard’s FSB (Front Side Bus) frequency has over 800 megahertz. However, it is slower than that of Pentium 4, which is over 3 gigahertz. Processor runs at a multiple of the motherboard clock speed, and is closely coupled to a local SRAM cache (L1 cache). If processor requires data it will fist look at L1 cache. If it is in L1 cache, the processor read the data at a high speed and no need to do the further search. If it is not, sadly processor has to slow down to the motherboard clock speed (what a drastic brake!) and contact to system controller. System controller will check if L2 cache has the required data. If has, the data is passed to processor. If not, processor has to access the DRAM, which is a relatively slow transfer.

    4.2 About PlayStation 2’s buses and caching.

    Recall Figure 2.2, we can see 32-bit interfaces between processor and I/O Processor, main memory and I/O Processor, which can achieve 3.2GB/S bus speed. Although slower than Pentium 4, Emotion Engine itself is relatively slow as well, 300MHz MIPS III processor. However, PlayStation 2’s 32-bit interface, 10-channel DMAC, 128-bit internal bus, and small cache memory group to an incredible caching condition. Any data necessary can be store or download in time. This strategy takes 90% of DMA capability. It makes the latency which main memory generates is acceptable for Emotion Engine.

    4.3 Comparison

    This time we can talk about digits some more. Let’s see a Pentium 4’s cache memory

    L1 trace cache: 150K

    L1 data memory: 16K

    L2 memory: 256K ~ 2MB total: 422~2204K

    Let’s see PlayStation 2 next

    VU0 data memory: 4K

    VU0 instruction memory 4K

    VU1 data memory 16K

    VU1 instruction memory 16K

    MIPS III data memory: 2-way 8K

    MIPS III instruction memory: 2-way 16K total: 64K

    Contrast to Pentium 4, the cache memory of PlayStation 2 is too small. Its capability is indeed ‘weak’ in the present. Pentium 4 is able to hold more data and does more computations in parallel. However, PC architecture hasn’t been improved along with the processor. No matter how Pentium 4 fast is, present bus architecture is never going to perform Pentium 4 100% capability. PlayStation 2 achieves a nearly perfect structure and mechanism, which helps it exert as much as it can (or maybe I should say because Pentium 4 is too fast, the memory speed is relatively too slow). Besides, it remarkably low down the cost, you can afford a PlayStation 2 plus a controller with the same price of a single Pentium 4 chip.

    5. VIDEO PERFORMANCE

    5.1 Comparison of performance between PC and PlayStation 2

    Figure 5.1 Need for Speed Most Wanted (PlayStation 2) 2006 by EA GAMES

    PlayStation 2 Graphics Synthesizer (GS)

    · 150 MHz (147.456 MHz)

    · 16 Pixel Pipelines

    · 2.4 Gigapixels per Second (no texture)

    · 1.2 Gigatexels per Second

    · Point, Bilinear, Trilinear, Anisotropic Mip-Map Filtering

    · Perspective-Correct Texture Mapping

    · Bump Mapping

    · Environment Mapping

    · 32-bit Color (RGBA)

    · 32-bit Z Buffer

    · 4MB Multiported Embedded DRAM

    · 38.4 Gigabytes per Second eDRAM Bandwidth (19.2 GB/s in each direction)

    · 9.6 Gigabytes per Second eDRAM Texture Bandwidth

    · 150 Million Particles per Second

    · Polygon Drawing Rate:

    · 75 Million Polygons per Second (small polygon)

    · 50 Million Polygons per Second (48-pixel quad with Z and Alpha)

    · 30 Million Polygons per Second (50-pixel triangle with Z and Alpha)

    · 25 Million Polygons per Second (48-pixel quad with Z, Alpha, and Texture)

    · 18.75 Million Sprites per Second (8 x 8 pixel sprites)

    Figure 5.2 Needs for Speed Most Wanted (PC) 2006 by EA GAMES

    PC Graphics Chip RADEON X300 SE PCI Express

    · Bus type PCI Express (x16 lanes)

    · Maximum vertical refresh rate 85 Hz

    · Display support Integrated 400 MHz RAMDAC

    · Display max resolution 2048 x 1536

    · Board configuration

    · 64 MB frame buffer

    · Graphics Chip RADEON X300 SE PCI Express

    · Core clock 325 MHz

    · Memory clock 200 MHz

    · Frame buffer 64 MB DDR

    · Memory I/O 64 bit

    · Memory Configuration 4 pieces 8Mx16 DDR

    · Board configuration

    · 128 MB frame buffer

    · Specification Description

    · Graphics Chip RADEON X300 SE PCI Express

    · Core clock 325 MHz

    · Memory clock 200 MHz

    · Frame buffer 128 MB DDR

    · Memory I/O 64 bit

    · Memory Configuration 4 pieces 16M x 16 DDR

    · Memory type DDR1

    · Memory 128 MB

    · Operating systems support Windows? 2000, Windows XP, Linux XFree86 and X.Org.

    · Core power 16 W (Max board power)

    From the data we can see. GS is too weak, contrast to low-level video card of PC. However, the performance of PlayStation is not too that bad. I don’t want to analyze data here. What I am interested to discuss is about the performance itself.

    Let’s see Figure 5.2 in detail. Texture is very clear and exquisite. This is what big video memory offers. The tree leaves in distance need a lot of polygons to build. The video card itself is low-level; possess no special effect for the game rendering. No refection and other sparking place can be found. In general, the game performance is only ok.

    Figure 5.3 PC game rendering related architecture

    Now let’s see PlayStation 2’s performance, which is in Figure 5.1. We see a good image. If you look the image in detail, you may found the mountain beside the road is weird: the shape of mountain is not that nature, like some spectrum graphics. This is done by VU1, which draws the Bezile, build 3D graphic based on the curve. Although not good enough, how many people will actually notice that when dashing at over 200km/h with his virtual car? VU1 does a lot of job like that and it could generate a lot of shapes without too many polygons to build. Now let’s see the car, the refection of cars is true reflection (which means it is not fake texture pretended to be the reflection), we can distinguish the mountains behind, however very blur. The whole image is not as clear as Figure 5.2 because the limitation of GS’s video memory (4M). However, this image is good enough for most PlayStation 2 players.

    5.2 Some more about the video performance

    Although Pentium 4 has enough capability to process image real time, the way of implementing games is still no change. The video card read the content of texture into its local memory card, the processor only deal with the data and instructions. After the calculation, the processor stores the display list (a list, recorded with the details of all elements, for instance, one single polygon’s position and texture code) back to the main memory. Video card then access the lists and process them, generate picture, transfer to analogue signal and output. Most special effects depend on the video card. So, no good card, no good performance.

    Let’s see figure 2.2, we will see there is no direct connection between GS and main memory. At the PC’s point of view, 4MB video-memory is not enough to show a single frame with 1024*768 pixels. How is PlayStation 2 able to perform like that? The answer is bus. So we come back to section 4 again. The specialized display list (which Sony called 3D display list) is directly sent to GS, along with the required texture. GS has a huge bandwidth (3.8GB/S), its local memory can work as fast as it is (maybe it is more suitable if we call the memory as cache). GS itself supports only a few special effects. However, this situation can be improved by the simulation calculations finished by Emotion Engine… Again, PlayStation 2’s elegant design makes its all components work as a whole.

    6. CONCLUSION

    Hopefully you have got the idea of how PlayStation 2 and PC architecture differ. Let’s go through it again.

    General architecture. PCs are more complex to read, but easier to implement. The system bus directly manages all devices inter-communications. PlayStation 2’s is easy to read, but much harder to implement. The communication between each other is convenient.

    Processor architecture. The trend of processor architecture design is meeting the requirement of multimedia. Both PC’s Pentium 4 and PlayStation 2’s Emotion Engine are qualified to run multimedia applications efficiently. Pentium 4 is much stronger than Emotion Engine, but the architecture is very ‘straight’ and has to do extra jobs of translating instructions to be compatible with current applications. Emotion Engine has no this burden, the specialized 3D game performance design make it easy to handle complex calculation jobs with relatively low clock rate.

    Buses and Caching. PC has classic bottlenecks and there is no way to overcome it. Current PC buses and cache has improved a lot by increasing the bandwidth and cache volumes, but the latency of main memory cannot be solved. PlayStation 2 works on nearly full load; perfect coordination between components is almost achieved.

    Video. Although Pentium 4 can run perfectly on multimedia applications, the PC game developers don’t think so. They still stick to push the texture and other data into the video memory for one time. The awkward situation is, when you want to update your PC for high requirement games, the first component came into your mind must be the video card but processor. It is impossible to ask PlayStation 2 players to update. Emotion Engine is in charge of many jobs what PC’s video card does. The good condition of data transmission makes it is possible to implement ‘true’ multimedia processing in games, that is treating game image as media streams, no need to supply huge data storage to hold that.

    Purpose: PC’s general—purpose VS PlayStation 2’s 3D game rendering purpose.

    PlayStation 2 is 6 years old now. According to the principle of game console life expectance, it is time to hand the baton to its offspring, PlayStation 3. It is a successful game console of Sony. Contrast to PC, it is too weird, but all its weird compositions seemed so reasonable as well. PC’s architecture is classical; all components have its space for upgrade. Maybe it is too early to say the architecture should evolve. However, PlayStation 2’s architecture gave us a good lesson. If you only were interested in games, you should buy a PlayStation series, not a PC. At least, you need not worry about upgrading your components for the next game. Special architecture can make it becomes the best in specialized region.

    7. REFERENCE

    [1] William Buchanan and Austin Wilson, “Advanced PC Architecture”, ISBN: 0 201 39858 3

    [2] John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson, “Computer Architecture—A Quantitative Approach”, ISBN: 1 55890 724 2

    [3] Keith Diefendorff and Pradeep K. Dubey, "How Multimedia Workloads Will Change Processor Design." Computer, September 1997

    [4] Jon "Hannibal" Stokes Sound and Vision: A Technical Overview of the Emotion Engine Wednesday, February 16, 2000

    [5] K. Kutaragi et al "A Micro Processor with a 128b CPU, 10 Floating-Point MACs, 4 Floating-Point Dividers, and an MPEG2 Decoder," ISSCC (Int’l Solid-State Circuits Conf.) Digest of Tech. Papers,Feb. 1999, pp. 256-257.

    [6] Jon "Hannibal" Stokes “SIMD architectures”

    arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/simd.ars

    [7] “Graphics Synthesizer – Features and General Specifications”

    arstechnica.com/cpu/1q99/playstation2-gfx.html

    [8] “The Technology behind PlayStation 2”

    ieee.org.uk/docs/sony.pdf

    [9] Michael Karbo,“PC Architecture“

    karbosguide.com/books/pcarchitecture/start.htm

    [10] Gabriel Torres, “Inside Pentium 4 Architecture”

    hardwaresecrets.com/article/235/1

    [11] Thomas Pabst, “Intel’s new Pentium 4 Architecture”

    tomshardware.co.uk/2000/11/20/intel/

    [12] KuaiLeDaYuShu, “Video Card Parameters Analysis”

    blog.yesky.com/Blog/joyelm/archive/2005/07/30/253803.html

    [13]Howstuffworks “How PlayStation 2 Works”

    entertainment.howstuffworks.com/ps21.htm

    [14] Craig Steffen “Scientific Computation on PlayStation 2 home page”

英语硕士论文篇6

致谢是论文或专著中不可缺少的一部分，作者通过致谢对个人或机构的帮助表示感谢，由此为自己建立一个良好的学术和社会身份。口笔语中的致谢研究由来已久，如Hyland（2003，2004）提出回顾、感谢和宣称三语步模式。马蓉和王新国（2005）发现，许多中国学生对致谢部分的表达没有把握，该部分写作主要通过模仿他人论文来完成。赵明炜和姜亚军（2010）分析了中国学生硕博论文中五种表达方式在各个语步中的分布情况及高频词汇等。李丽华和陈新仁（2010）从功能角度（包括致谢对象、感谢原因等）对学位论文英文致谢进行了研究。 

但是现阶段关于学位论文致谢部分的研究存在几个问题：首先，少有研究分析中国硕博士学位论文英文致谢是否存在差异。由于硕士和博士专业水平存在较大差距，因此两个群体在英文致谢中的异同点值得探讨。其次，此前研究多数将句式进行简单罗列或列举出高频单词，而未把高频句式与单词有机结合起来，归纳出常用的表达方式，即词块。词块，又称预制语块，是指由单词或其他成分组成的连续或非连续序列，不受语法分析的限制，整体存储和使用（Wray，2002）。词块在写作中的作用已得到证实，如戚焱（2005）指出词块有利于提高写作的流利性、表达的地道性和生动性以及学生的篇章组织能力。因此，总结出学位论文致谢部分的常用词块不仅可以减轻学生写作时的负担，同时可以提高论文的写作质量。 

2.研究问题及方法 

本研究选取60篇中国硕博论文中英文致谢部分，拟从词块类型（二词、三词、四词词块）和功能（感谢主体、感谢行为、感谢对象、感谢内容和连接词块）两个角度出发，通过对比分析中国硕博学位论文英文致谢中的词块，旨在回答以下问题： 

1）中国硕士生和博士生在学位论文英文致谢部分中所使用的高频词块数量及类型有无异同？原因为何？ 

2）中国硕士生和博士生在学位论文英文致谢部分中所使用的每一功能的高频词块有何异同？原因为何？ 

为确保数据的可靠性，本研究采用机器与人工相结合的方法提取词块。语料中的高频词块界定为二词词块出现5次，三词词块4次，四词词块3次。 

3.结果与讨论 

3.1硕博论文致谢部分词块类型对比分析 

经分析，硕士语料中的词块总数远小于博士语料。前者为57，后者为95，前者比后者少了约40%。 

从各类型词块数量上讲，两者也不尽相同。硕士语料中三种词块比例相当。而博士语料中三种词块使用数量相差相对较大。两语料中，四词词块均使用最多，且占总数比例相当，但数量上硕士语料比博士语料少了约46%。两语料对比，三词和二词词块的比例相差较大。值得注意的是，硕士语料中较多使用三词词块，而博士语料中二词词块的数目相对较多。 

两语料在词块数量及类型上之所以出现较大差距，除篇幅原因外，还可能因为博士生在表达过程中更注重长短交替的语言变化，硕士生由于学习年限较低，在此方面的意识不够强烈。 

3.2硕博论文致谢部分词块功能对比分析 

经分析，硕士语料中感谢内容、感谢行为和感谢对象所占比例相差不大，而其他两类功能词块数量较少。但博士语料中各功能词块所占比例差距很大。 

从每一词块功能来看，硕士语料中的3个感谢主体均包含在博士语料的8个中。两份语料中的感谢行为词块在各自词块总数中所占比例几乎相同，而数目差距主要由修饰语造成。就感谢对象而言，硕士语料中数量偏高同样是由修饰语及后置定语引起。感谢内容上的差异在两份语料中最为明显，其原因同样是修饰语以及表达的多样性。两份语料中出现的连接词块都很少，这是因为论文致谢部分格式较为单一，学生基本按照每段感谢一个人或一类人的模式写作。 

4.结论与启示 

通过对比中国硕博论文英文致谢中的词块，本研究得出以下结论： 

1）硕博论文英文致谢部分词块使用总量差距很大，硕士论文总数远小于博士论文。这说明硕士阶段的学生对致谢部分的表达方式仍待进一步学习和提高。 

2）硕博论文英文致谢部分各功能词块使用水平参差不齐，引起差距的主要原因为修饰语的使用。此外，博士论文语言相对丰富，硕士生要在语言多样性方面进一步加强。 

本研究初步对比分析了硕博论文英文致谢部分的词块，发现硕博语料中存在的差距，对硕士论文英文致谢部分的写作提出了相应建议。不可避免的是，本研究仍存在一些不足之处，如所选语料样本较小，语料体裁单一等。以后的研究可扩大语料范围，进行更为详细的探究，以帮助硕博学生更好地进行论文写作。 

参考文献： 

[1]李丽华，陈新仁.英汉学位论文致谢辞的语用对比研究[J].西安外国语大学学报[J]，2010（2）：35-42. 

英语硕士论文篇7

关键词：共性与个性；翻译思维能力；翻译问题求解能力

中图分类号：G643 文献标志码：A 文章编号：1674-9324（2014）35-0102-02

“翻译是基于情境和经验的一个创造性构建过程，自有认识与外部认识的共现与交互是译者的认知前提，问题求解是译者思维过程的核心特征，思维能力是译者实现问题求解的主观条件。”译者能力的核心是解决翻译问题所需的高阶思维能力，培养和训练翻译硕士的翻译思维能力是提升翻译硕士能力的关键。以英译汉为例，译者的英、汉双语能力要过关，要有广博的百科知识，要有科学严谨的翻译精神，要有一定的翻译理论知识，要有掌握网络等翻译媒体技能，更重要的是翻译思维能力。因为前面几个能力是译者必备的客观能力，而翻译思维能力，即翻译问题求解能力是译者翻译工作的主观条件。面对一个翻译任务，在分析源语文体、风格、背景、主旨等基础上，要采取什翻译策略则是译者思维过程的结果。所以，所谓的异化与归化、文言与白话、忠实与创造的度的把握等，皆是翻译策略的体现，皆是译者在分析源语的基础上思维过程的产物。由此可见，在译者具备了翻译的客观条件的前提下，最主要的是加强译者翻译思维能力的训练。

一、如何加强翻译思维能力的训练

1.加强译者问题求解能力训练。把每次翻译当作一次任务，借助已有知识储备，仔细研读原文，找出诸如术语、新表达等翻译难点，然后重点把思维的重点和难点放在这些“硬骨头”上。借助网络等电子工具，请教专家或与翻译小组成员共同探讨，但最终的译文表达则是经过反复质疑和查证等翻译思维能力的结果。因此，译者的翻译思维能力越强，越能做好翻译。

2.加强译者严谨、质疑、思辨、创新和科学求证精神的培养。译界大师傅雷素以严谨著称，堪称译界楷模。傅氏在动手翻译前，保持着一个习惯，就是先认真研读原文，力求把握原文的文气、灵魂和主旨，在最少研读四、五遍之后，才着手翻译，并力求传神地再现原文风采及众所周知的“神似”翻译观。翻译文本、翻译工具、翻译环境、译者的知识和翻译经验等在不断变化发展，因此翻译也应与时俱进，尤其是要译者敢于质疑、敢于思辨、敢于创新，并且不断提升科学求证的能力。通过对中西方一些译学理论的研究，专家们发现，有些理论知识假设还有待接受实践的检验，有些理论只是在一定时间、一定领域适用，因此译者不能墨守陈规，而应大胆质疑、求证，不断地完善翻译理论与应用能力。如对翻译忠实与创造的理解上，翻译观就发生了变化。以前翻译停留在忠实与美的争论上，后来引进了文体与翻译。译文忠实多少、译文创造多少，这取决于翻译文体。以文学翻译为例，在忠实原文的基础上，应给译者一定的创造性，否则译文的文学性荡然无存，尤其是诗歌翻译，创造性的成分会更大；再以宗教法律翻译为例，译者不能随意发挥创造，否则就会不忠实，甚至“吃官司”。

3.既要考虑作者因素，又要充分考虑读者因素。译者既不能抛开原文不顾，乱译胡译；又不能太忠实源语，甚至照搬源语句结构，让读者不知所云。翻译是以交际为目的的，要充分考虑焦急的数量、质量和风格等原则。因此，理想的结合点就是，在重视源语的基础上，考虑原语的体裁，充分考虑译入语的读者对象，采取适当的翻译策略以便于交际。究竟异化多一些，还是归化多一些，这只是翻译策略问题，取决于文体与译语读者群体。

二、英语翻译硕士相对于翻译的个性

英语翻译硕士属于专业型硕士，因此英语翻译硕士一个显著特点就是培养实用英语翻译技能人才。从这个角度来讲，它不同于传统意义上的偏重理论研究的翻译学习。简言之，学翻译硕士，就是要在大量翻译实践的基础上，不断反思、不断总结、不断积累经验并上升到理论，使翻译成为一种职业，成为一种实践活动，而不是停留在理论研究的层面上。重实践不是忽视理论。殊途同归，翻译硕士，从研究翻译问题开始，采取问题的翻译策略，进而发散到平行文本的翻译，希望在这种尝试中，训练译者的翻译思维能力、问题求解能力，进而积累翻译经验，完善翻译理论。这符合人们“理论来源于实践的并接受实践检验”的认知规律。

三、翻译硕士使用译语要非常准确、简洁、传神，要符合规范

要避免翻译腔，不能“的的不休”，污染了译语生态环境。散文家、翻译家余光中先生在翻译名篇“论的的不休”中，大量列举国语恶性西化之弊，力主保持中文之生态。毋庸置疑，英译汉是把英文传达的意思用中文表达出来，从而达到信息交流之目的。然而，时下众多英文中译刻意求“精”，置“通顺”于不顾，句法夹缠，畸形西化，令读者不明不白，妨碍了正常交流，甚至污染了中文简洁对称、铿锵有力之常态。译文的语言文字是原文信息的载体，译文生硬繁琐、恶性西化，势必与翻译之目的相悖，甚至严重破坏了中文常态，后果不堪设想。译坛译意派认为，英文中译首先应遵循两条原则：忠实原文和中文表达习惯。现代翻译理论认为，译者能力实质上存在于环境、译者、知识等要素等交互等多维空间，是译者与原作者及其描写的社会存在、读者等因素的跨时空对话。怎样才能在各个时空有效地与作者、作品角色以及读者对话呢？看不懂源语或看不懂译语，是信息不匹配造成的。因此关联信息匹配度与交际效果成正比例，匹配度越高，交际过程就越顺利。从这个角度上来讲，提高英语翻译硕士翻译能力，既要关注文本与受者互动的脑力活动，又要培养译者推导源语意图的能力。简言之，翻译即搭建、解释相似性，追求源语与译语的最佳匹配（相似性）。翻译硕士学习，就是提高译者这种与源语对话的有效性，因此译者要训练这种双语信息匹配能力。翻译硕士要按以下的标准严格要求自己：翻译策略属于情境构建型；关注任务环境、生态环境、社会环境；关注动态系统的深层知识；翻译以意义翻译为主，采取整体角度自上而下或交互式的翻译顺序；翻译思维相对复杂，以高阶思维为主；译文符合专业规范，交际性强。

简言之，笔者认为英语翻译硕士学习，一方面要继续加强双语学习，提升双语应用能力；另一方面在大量翻译练习的基础上，不断提升翻译思维能力和翻译问题求解能力，时刻以一名优秀、合格的译员的要求来严格要求自己。

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[1]冯建文.译文归化与保存异域情趣[J].外语教学，1993，（53）：11-14.

[2]连淑能.英汉对比研究[M].北京：高等教育出版社，2007.

[3]刘宓庆.文体与翻译[M].北京：中国对外翻译出版公司，2009.

[4]怒安.傅雷谈翻译[M].沈阳：辽宁教育出版社，2005.

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英语硕士论文篇8

【关键词】工程硕士；英语教学；教学模式

《全国工程硕士专业学位研究生英语教学要求》指出，工程硕士研究生英语教学的目的是培养攻读该学位的在职人员具备硕士学位研究生应具备的实际英语运用能力，在本学科的全面素质上体现工程硕士研究生的特点，即：具有较熟练的阅读理解能力，一定的翻译写作能力和基本的听说能力，以适应在本学科研究中大量查阅国外文献和进行对外交流的需要，并为以后在英语方面的深造打下坚实的基础。结合工程硕士教学要求，教师应该探索如何结合教材内容，进行多种形式，多方交叉式的课程教学改革。我们的教学应该有两个目的：（1）从学生角度出发，了解学生想学什么，需要什么，并科学合理的加以引导。（2）培养学生学会学习，享受学习的快乐，而不仅是为完成任务，通过考试。本文将从工程硕士学生特点和学生需求角度对工程硕士英语教学模式进行探索。

一、工程硕士研究生英语学习状况及问题分析

随着经济社会的不断发展和用人单位的实际需求，近年来各高校每年工程硕士研究生的招生数量和在读人数都在增长很快。2011年工程硕士研究生录取人数达到13.9万人。由于工程硕士研究生来源比较复杂，年龄层次不一，本科毕业时间有很大差距，诸多因素导致他们公共课和专业学习水平有比较大的差异，这为提高工程硕士教育水平和提高实际专业能力提出了很大的挑战。

1、英语听说读写译五个方面中，工程硕士研究生的听说水平最差

由于工程硕士研究生一般已经工作四年以上，年龄较大，并且大学阶段通过大学英语四级之后，除了专业英语之外很少再接触英语学习，外语水平相比大学阶段已经有很大的差距，与研究生英语大纲要求相差一段距离，并且对多数工科学生而言，英语本身就是老大难问题，所以入学后英语学习比较吃力，困难较大。

2、写作水平较差，不知如何进行英语应用文写作，甚至不能表达思想

大学阶段，学生英语写作学习局限于三段式的论说文，鲜有涉及应用文的写作。而工程硕士研究生来说，他们急切需要学习的是工作实际中的实用写作的需要，比如英文信函、英文摘要、实验报告、学术论文等，这些实际需要对他们的英语应用文写作能力提出了更高的要求。

3、对英语学习投入时间少，重视不够

工程硕士研究生都是在职攻读学位，这就避免不了工作时间和学习时间的平衡问题，从而直接影响了英语学习的投入时间。据调查，多数学生承认除了课上有限的时间外，课外忙于工作和家庭，很少有机会静下心来学习英语，投入时间太少，重视不够。

4、以精读教程为主题的课程设置无法满足培养学生多元化实际交际能力的要求

传统的工程硕士英语课程设置及教学内容在某种程度上是大学英语教学的翻版，这类以阅读为主、带有重复性的英语课程又将研究生带回到语言基础训练阶段，从而浪费了教学资源及学习时间。语言学习的阶段性标志之一是教学内容的差异。国外语言研究者区分基础阶段教学差别是所采用的普遍方法是词汇难度阶梯以及课文难度指数。很显然，在工程硕士研究生阶段，英语教学的内容应注重语言能力向运用技能方向的转换，特别是应该提高学习者英语听说交际技能的培养。

二、从学生需求角度提高工程硕士研究生英语语言应用能力

课堂教学是大学人才培养的主要环节，也是创新人才培养的主要渠道。在教学内容上，应以学生探究活动为主线，强调知识发现的过程，通识将科研最新成果引入教学。由于工程硕士课程设置的特点，结合学生的实际需求，教师应该在教学实际中更加注重学生英语语言应用能力的培养。

1、课程设置的改进

工程硕士研究生英语教学的目的是培养攻读该学位的在职人员具备硕士学位研究生应具备的实际英语运用能力。结合这一要求，我们首先应该摆脱过去照本宣科式的只重视精读的教学模式，在课程中逐步开设应用文写作和实用英语写作类型的相关课程。由于工硕学生大多有实际工作经验，实用英语书信如申请书、推荐信、社交书信、公文书信等对大家更有吸引力。还有，非书信类的应用文体如电报电传、标识语、证明书、请柬、海报、广告、旅游指南及演说词等也具有很高的实用性。这些看得见、摸得着、用得上的东西是学生感兴趣的，也是容易被接受的教学内容。

2、教学内容的改进

工硕硕士研究生在实际工作中有很多接触外国人和外国文化的机会，因此，他们对了解外国文化和外国风俗习惯有迫切要求。在实际教学中，教师应该比较多的介绍西方英语国家的概况，如人文、政治以及各种风俗习惯，这也能进一步增加学生对外国文化的了解和修养，培养更全面的国际化人才。举个例子：教师可以就西方饮食习惯开设专题讲座，播放饭店英语等视频，使学生对出国如何点餐、如何结账等有基本的了解。毋庸置疑，这种专题课会极大地激发学生学习的兴趣，促进语言应用能力的培养。

3、教学形式的改进

结合具体教学实践，工程硕士研究生英语课程应该彻底摒弃教师“一言堂”式的教学模式，在实践中给学生创造应用英语的机会。在课堂上可以结合学生特点，着重开展小组合作学习模式，从而培养学生的认知能力和锻炼交际能力。作者体会，课堂活动要具备以下几个特点：（1）能够使人产生“说”的欲望，即交际的欲望，就是说，存在一些需要学生通过交际找到信息、观点或原因的障碍，从而达到交际的目的；（2）重点在于信息交流，能够使学生将注意力集中在该说什么而不是该怎么说上；（3）使用语言达到一定的交流目的；（4）能够鼓励学生创新，提出自己的想法。

三、结语

工程硕士研究生学生具有不同于全日制研究生和大学生的自身特点，其身在学校但是又和社会实践紧密结合，所以他们的英语学习更应该注重应用能力的培养。因此，我们应该在工程硕士研究生教学实际中不断发现、不断总结，进一步完善课程设置，丰富教学内容，激发学习兴趣，培养出英语语言应用能力强的新型人才。

【参考文献】

[1]非英语专业研究生英语教学大纲编写组.硕士/博士学位研究生英语教学大纲[M].重庆：重庆大学出版社，1993.