Ch2.1 - 2.4 Flashcards
What is a personal computer (PC)?
“A computer designed for use by an individual, usually incorporating a graphics display, a keyboard, and a mouse.”
What is a server?
“A computer used for running larger programs for multiple users, often simultaneously, and typically accessed only via a network.”
What is a supercomputer?
“A class of computers with the highest performance and cost; they are configured as servers and typically cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.”
What is an embedded computer?
“A computer inside another device used for running one predetermined application or collection of software.”
What are processor cores?
“Many embedded processors are designed using processor cores, a version of a processor written in a hardware description language, such as Verilog or VHDL.”
What are personal mobile devices (PMDs)?
“Small wireless devices to connect to the Internet; they rely on batteries for power, and software is installed by downloading apps. Conventional examples are smart phones and tablets.”
What are Warehouse Scale Computers?
“Taking over from the conventional server is Cloud Computing, which relies upon giant datacenters that are now known as Warehouse Scale Computers (WSCs).”
What is cloud computing?
“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 (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.”
What is a multicore microprocessor?
“A microprocessor containing multiple processors (‘cores’) in a single integrated circuit.”
What is an acronym?
“A word constructed by taking the initial letters of a string of words. For example: RAM is an acronym for Random Access Memory, and CPU is an acronym for Central Processing Unit.”
What is a terabyte (TB)?
“Originally 1,099,511,627,776 (2^40) bytes, although communications and secondary storage systems developers started using the term to mean 1,000,000,000,000 (10^12) bytes.”
What is a tebibyte (TiB)?
“To reduce confusion, we now use the term tebibyte (TiB) for 2^40 bytes, defining terabyte (TB) to mean 10^12 bytes.”
What is Moore’s Law?
“States that integrated circuit resources double every 18-24 months.”
What are abstractions used for in computer architecture?
“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.”
Why is making the common case fast important in computer architecture?
“Making the common case fast will tend to enhance performance better than optimizing the rare case.”
How do computer architects increase performance through parallelism?
“Since the dawn of computing, computer architects have offered designs that get more performance by computing operations in parallel.”
What is pipelining in computer architecture?
“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.”
How does prediction help improve performance in computing?
“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 a 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.”
How is dependability achieved in computer systems?
“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 is systems software?
“Software that provides services that are commonly useful, including operating systems, compilers, loaders, and assemblers.”
What is the role of an operating system?
“Supervising program that manages the resources of a computer for the benefit of the programs that run on that computer.”
