Hardware Basic Functions Flashcards
What are the four steps of the Fetch-Execute Cycle?
- CPU gets instruction from memory
- Interprets instruction
- Performs instruction
- Moves onto next instruction
Is RAM primary or secondary storage?
Primary, Secondly is HDD
What does the Microprocessor Architecture identify?
The internal organization of the functional units and data paths that are implemented in the microprocessor
How is the time required to complete sequences of instructions in Von Neumann Bottleneck calculated?
no. of instructions x no. of clock cycles per instruction
Harvard Architecture vs Von Neumann
Harvard Architecture allows overlap the execution of multiple instructions whereas Von Neumann does not allow for overlap
What is the general concept of Pipelining?
Each stage performs its next on the current instruction, hands the instruction into the next stage and then starts on the next instruction
What does Multi-threading involve?
Breaking down instructions into separate processes and dividing time between all the processes to simulate simultaneous execution
What are cores?
Independent Processing Units
True or False: Creating two or more cores in the same CPU decreases processing power and makes clock speeds run an inefficient level
False, the opposite is True
Name two advantages of Multi-Core
Any 2:
- While working with many threads, a Multi Core processor with n cores can execute n threads simultaneously by assigning a core to each thread.
- If it must process more than n threads, say x, it can apply multithreading procedures with each core working with an average of x/n threads
- A single core processor must multithread with every single thread
Cons of Multi-Core
- Multi-threading is also a problem when the software being run is not designed to take advantage of the multi-core processor
- May mean that one core does most of the work which means that the processor is running no more efficiently than a single core.
