Book Chapter 3 CPU

Question 1

EDB

Answer 1

External Data Bus- Primary data highway of all computers. Everything in your computer is ties either directly or indirectly to the external data bus.

Question 2

Frontside Bus

Answer 2

On older PC architectures, the wires that connect the CPU to its external memory controller.

Question 3

Backside Bus

Answer 3

On older CPUs, a set of wires that connected the cpu to level 2 cache. First appeared in the intel pentium pro.

Question 4

Clock (CLK)

Answer 4

A charge on the CLK wire tells the CPU that another piece of information is waiting to be processed. A single charge to the CLK wire is a clock cycle.

Question 5

Registers

Answer 5

Store internal commands and data. “Light bulb” within the CPU. Part of the EDB.

Question 6

Clock Speed

Answer 6

The maximum number of clock cycles a CPU can handle in a given period of time.

Question 7

Hertz

Answer 7

Measure of clock speed. 1 Hz = 1 cycle per second.
1 MHz = 1 million cycles per second.
1 GHz = 1 billion cycles per second.

Question 8

RAM

Answer 8

Random Access Memory. Think of an electronic spreadsheet 1 byte across. The CPU accesses any one row of RAM as easily and as fast as any other row.

Question 9

DRAM

Answer 9

Dynamic RAM. Computers use DRAM for main memory storage. Needs constant electrical charge and a periodic refresh of the circuits.

Question 10

Address Bus

Answer 10

A second set of wires from the CPU called the address bus communicates with the MCC.

Question 11

MCC

Answer 11

Memory Controller Chip. This chip handles the mechanics of retrieving a requested row of data from the RAM.

Question 12

Clock multiplying/ Clock multiplier

Answer 12

CPU that takes the incoming clock signal and multiples it inside the CPU to let the internal circuitry of the CPU run faster. All modern CPUs run at some multiple of the system clock speed.
32 bit processing has a 4GB memory limit.
64 bit processing supports more than 4GB memory.

Question 13

Virtualization

Answer 13

Intel and AMD have built in support for running more than one operating system at a time. CompTIA A+ objectives refer to visualization support as the “virtual technology CPU feature”.

Question 14

Parallel Execution

Answer 14

CPU processing multiple commands and parts of commands in parallel.

Question 15

Pipelinning

Answer 15

To get a command from the data bus, do a calculation, and then send the answer back to the data bus, it takes four steps.
1. Fetch
2. Decode
3. Execute
4. Write

Question 16

Cache

Answer 16

L1 L2 L3 L4

Question 17

Throttling

Answer 17

Process of modifying the operating characteristics of a processor based on current conditions.

Question 18

Sockets

Answer 18

Commonly implemented processor sockets include the following

Question 19

CPU installation troubleshoot

Answer 19