Architecture Intro (PPT 1) Flashcards
What does a basic microcomputer consist of?
CPU, Memory(RAM and ROM), Input/Output
What connects the parts of a microcomputer?
Data bus and Address bus
CPU fetches a constant stream of what?
Instructions and Operands
How do we define computer power?
It is how quickly it can process instructions and data
What are the four main ways we can speed up a computer?
- Make the clock tick faster
- Improve the structure of the processor
- Do less of the slow parts
- Add Parallelism - do several things at the same time
What is Moore’s Law?
The number of transistors will double every 18 months
How can we improve the processor performance?
- Add more instructions
- Add more addressing modes
- Put some operands together with the opcode so there is only one fetch
- Pipeline instructions
- Using multiple pipelines
- Using multiple CPUs
- Push up the clock speed
What is pipelining instructions?
Allows the CPU to process several instructions at the same time.
What is the term for having multiple pipelines in a processor?
Super-Scalar Architecture
How can we improve memory performance?
- Minimising memory access by adding a small cache
- Raise the clock speed
How can we improve Input/Output?
- Move faster I/O devices onto faster buses
- Adopt new I/O techniques for both hardware and software
What is the trade off for increased performance?
Software and hardware become far more complex and create their own problems
What can we do to have a large main memory that responds with the speed of registers?
Use cache memory
What can we do to have virtual memory that responds with the spped of main memory?
We can use memory management
What is the memory structure of today’s PCs and what effect does this have?
Multi Level memory structure. This means that the closer to CPU registers, the faster the memory access but the smaller size.
