3 Instructions Flashcards
What is the third revolution that has been activated by computers?
Computers have led to a third revolution for civilization, with the information revolution taking its place alongside the agricultural and the industrial revolutions.
What is an embedded computer?
Embedded computer: A computer inside another device used for running one predetermined application or collection of software.
What does Cloud computing do?
Cloud computing refers to large collections of servers that provide services over the Internet; some providers rent dynamically varying numbers of servers as a utility.
What is Software as a Service?
Software as a Service (SaaS) delivers software and data as a service over the Internet, usually via a thin program such as a browser that runs on local client devices, instead of binary code that must be installed, and runs wholly on that device. Examples include web search and social networking.
What is a Multicore microprocessor?
Multicore microprocessor: A microprocessor containing multiple processors (“cores”) in a single integrated circuit.
What are abstractions?
A major productivity technique for hardware and software is to use abstractions to characterize the design at different levels of representation; lower-level details are hidden to offer a simpler model at higher levels.
What is the great idea of the common case?
Making the common case fast will tend to enhance performance better than optimizing the rare case.
What is the great idea of parallelism?
Since the dawn of computing, computer architects have offered designs that get more performance by computing operations in parallel.
What is the great idea of pipelining?
A particular pattern of parallelism is so prevalent in computer architecture that it merits its own name: pipelining, which moves multiple operations through hardware units that each do a piece of an operation, akin to water flowing through a pipeline.
What is the great idea of prediction?
The idea of prediction is that, in some cases it can be faster on average to guess and start working rather than wait until you know for sure, assuming that the mechanism to recover from a misprediction is not too expensive and your prediction is relatively accurate.
What is the great idea of the hierarchy of memories/hierarchy of memories?
Architects have found that they can address conflicting demands of fast, large, and cheap memory with a hierarchy of memories, with the fastest, smallest, and most expensive memory per bit at the top of the hierarchy and the slowest, largest, and cheapest per bit at the bottom.
What is the great idea of dependability?
Since any physical device can fail, we make systems dependable by including redundant components that can take over when a failure occurs and to help detect failures.
What does systems software consist of?
Systems software: Software that provides services that are commonly useful, including operating systems, compilers, loaders, and assemblers.
What does a compiler do?
Compiler: A program that translates high-level language statements into assembly language statements.
What is a Binary digit / bit?
Binary digit: Also called a bit. One of the two numbers in base 2 (0 or 1) that are the components of information.
