Section One - Components of a Computer System Flashcards
What is the purpose of a computer?
Take data, process it and then output it.
What is hardware?
Hardware is the physical stuff that makes up your computer system, like the CPU, motherboard monitor and printer
What is software?
Software is the programs or applications that a computer system runs, like an operating system, word processors or video games
What is an embedded system?
Embedded systems are computers built into other devices, like dishwashers, microwaves, and TV’s. They are usually dedicated systems
What is the CPU?
The CPU is the brain of the computer system, it processes all of the data and instructions that make a system work. The processing power of the CPU depends on different characteristics, like it’s clock speed, number of cores and cache size
What are the three main parts of a CPU?
The control unit (CU)
The arithmetic logic unit (ALU)
The cache
What does the control unit (CU) do?
It has the overall control of the CPU, is main job is to execute program instructions by following the fetch-decode-execute cycle.
It controls the flow of data inside the CPU and outside the CPU
What does the Arithmetic Logic Unit?
The ALU does all the calculations, it completes simple addition and subtraction, compares the size of numbers and can do multiplication and divisions.
What does the Cache do?
The cache has very fast memory in the CPU. it’s slower than the registers but faster than RAM. It stores regularly used data so that the CPU ca access it quickly the next time its needed. When the CPU requests data, it checks if the cache first to see if the data is there, if not it will fetch it from ram
What is Volatile memory?
Temporary memory that requires power to retain its data
What is Non-volatile memory
Non-Volatile memory is permanent memory, it keeps its contents even when it has no power.
What is RAM
RAM(Random Access Memory) is used as the main memory in a computer, it can be read or written too and it is volatile.
What is ROM?
ROM(Read Only Memory) is non volatile memory and can only be read not written to.
What is the Clock Speed?
The number of instructions a single processor core can carry out per second (Hz). For most desktop computers, this will be somewhere around 3.5 GHz (3 bullion instructions per second)
What is the Number of Cores?
Each core in a CPU can process data independently of the rest. The more cores a CPU has, the more instructions it can carry out at once, so the faster it can process a batch of data
