CDA3100 Midterm Flashcards
intended for user at a stationary location, emphasize good performance to single users at low cost
personal computers
accessed by other computers to provide computation and/or data, typically accessed via network, greater computing, storage, and I/O capacity
servers
computers contained in other devices, usually small, emphasis on const and low power
embedded computers
battery-powered wireless devices with multimedia user such as smartphones and tablets, reliance on touch screens, emphasis on const and energy efficiency
PMD(s) (personal mobile devices)
What are the 5 classes of computers?
embedded computers, personal computers, pmd, servers, wsc
large collection of servers connected by a network to act as a single powerful computer, scalability and availability handled through the network
WSC(s) (large clusters/warehouse-scale computers)
What are the 8 great architecture ideas?
design for Moore's Law, use abstraction, common case fast, parallelism, pipe-lining, prediction, hierarchy of memories, redundancy
high level language
level at which programmers develop applications
assembly language
symbolic representation of instructions
machine language
binary representations of instructions that can be executed by a processor
linker
translates machine language files into a single executable file that can be loaded into memory and executed
$ra
return address
$gp
global pointer
$t0-$t7
temporaries
$a0-$a3
arguments
$v0-$v1
values for results and expression evaluations
$zero
the constant value zero
$fp
frame pointer
What is the global pointer?
Points to the middle of the 64K block of memory in the static data segment.
What is the stack pointer ($sp)?
stack pointer
Points to last location on the stack.
