Architecture Flashcards
What is a program?
Set of instructions for
- Processing
- Storing
- Transferring
- And controlling data
What is an integrated circuit?
-built from many transistors
What is computer organisation?
- How does a computer work
- Encompasses all physical aspects of computer system
What are the levels of computer organisation?
- component level (cpu, buses etc)
- sub-component level (ALU, registers etc
- functional level (inside ALU)
- logic (gates)
- circuit level
- physical implementation
What is computer architecture?
- How do I design a computer?
- focuses on structure and behaviour of a computer
- refers to the logical and abstract aspects of system
- combination of hardware and the instruction set arch (ISA)
What are some of the things included with computer architecture?
- instruction sets
- op codes
- memory addresses
- data types
- registers
What is the principle of equivalence of hardware and software
-Any task done by software can be done by hardware and vise-versa
At its most basic level what is a computer made up of? What is this known as?
- a processor to interpret and execute programs
- a memory to store both data and programs
- mechanism for transferring data to and from the outside world
- Alonzo churches Thesis, about potential. Can it be a computer?
What is the purpose of a computer clock?
- sends electrical pulses around computer ensuring data and instructions will be where they are meant to be when they are meant to be
- instructions per second is directly proportional to clock speed
What is the system bus?
- group of wires that moves data and instructions to various places in the computer
- responsible for all data movement internal to the computer
What is the local bus?
- high speed pathway which directly connects memory and processor
- bus speed is the bottleneck on many computer systems
What is SDRAM?
- Synchronised dynamic RAM
- much faster than normal memory as it can sync with processors bus
What is the south bridge?
-integrated circuit on the MB which connects slower I/O devices to the system bus
What do SATA, IDE and EIDE all have in common?
- All share main Systems bus with processor and the memory
- Bcoz SATA is a way to connect hard-drives to MB this means transfer speed from disk is also dependent on the speed of the system bus
What are ports?
-allow movement of data to and from devices external to a computer
What are serial and parallel ports? What has replaced them?
- Serial ports transfer data by sending a series of pulses across one or two data lines
- parallel uses at least 8 lines
- USB has replaced them on MB’s
What is PCI and PCIe
- Peripheral component interconnect
- allows connection of multiple peripheral devices
- like USB also supports plug and play
- replaced by PCIe
- PCIe also replaced AGP (advanced graphics port)
What is dot pitch?
- measure of resolution in CRT displays
- distance between pixel of one colour and the next closest pixel of the same colour
- smaller the dot pitch the longer the re-fresh rate and vise-versa
Difference between active and passive matrix technology?
- Active uses one transistor per pixel (better image)
- passive uses transistors that activate entire rows and columns (cheaper)
What is special about LCD’s?
-have native resolution meaning they were designed for a particular resolution
What’s the response time?
- LCD’s version of re-fresh rate
- measures time it takes pixel to switch colour
What is luminance?
- measure of the amount of light an LCD monitor emits
- average ranges from 200-300 cd/m2
What is the contrast ratio?
- measures difference in intensity between bright whites and dark blacks
- can be static and dynamic
- static = ratio to the brightest point on the monitor to the darkest point at a given instant in time
- dynamic = ratio to another image produced at a different time
- static is preferred
What is colour depth?
-number of colours that can be on the screen at any one time