Computer Architecture C952 correctly answered to pass
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Module
WGU C173
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WGU C173
Computer Architecture C952 correctly answered to pass
information revolution
Computers have led to a third revolution for civilization, with the information revolution taking its place alongside the agricultural and the industrial revolutions.
Personal computer
A computer designed for use b...
computer architecture c952 correctly answered to p
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Computer Architecture C952 correctly
answered to pass
information revolution
Computers have led to a third revolution for civilization, with the information revolution taking its
place alongside the agricultural and the industrial revolutions.
Personal computer
A computer designed for use by an individual, usually incorporating a graphics display, a keyboard,
and a mouse.
Server
A computer used for running larger programs for multiple users, often simultaneously, and typically
accessed only via a network.
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.
Embedded computer
A computer inside another device used for running one predetermined application or collection of
software.
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.
Personal mobile devices (PMDs)
are 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.
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).
Cloud computing
refers to large collections of servers that provide services over the Internet; some providers rent
dynamically varying numbers of servers as a utility.
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. Examples include web search and social networking.
Multicore microprocessor
A microprocessor containing multiple processors ("cores") in a single integrated circuit.
,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.
Terabyte (TB)
Originally 1,099,511,627,776 (240) bytes, although communications and secondary storage systems
developers started using the term to mean 1,000,000,000,000 (1012) bytes.
tebibyte (TiB)
To reduce confusion, we now use the term tebibyte (TiB) for 240 bytes, defining terabyte (TB) to
mean 1012 bytes.
Moore's Law
states that integrated circuit resources double every 18-24 months.
abstractions
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.
common case
Making the common case fast will tend to enhance performance better than optimizing the rare case.
parallel
Since the dawn of computing, computer architects have offered designs that get more performance
by computing operations in parallel.
pipelining
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 owing through a pipeline.
prediction
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.
hierarchy of memory
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.
dependable
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.
,Systems software
Software that provides services that are commonly useful, including operating systems, compilers,
loaders, and assemblers.
Operating system
Supervising program that manages the resources of a computer for the benefit of the programs that
run on that computer.
Compiler
A program that translates high-level language statements into assembly language statements.
binary numbers
The two symbols for these two letters are the numbers 0 and 1, and we commonly think of the
computer language as numbers in base 2, or binary numbers.
Binary digit
Also called a bit. One of the two numbers in base 2 (0 or 1) that are the components of information.
Assembler
A program that translates a symbolic version of instructions into the binary version.
Assembly language
A symbolic representation of machine instructions.
Machine language
A binary representation of machine instructions.
High-level programming language
A portable language such as C, C++, Java, or Visual Basic that is composed of words and algebraic
notation that can be translated by a compiler into assembly language.
Input device
A mechanism through which the computer is fed information, such as a keyboard.
Output device
A mechanism that conveys the result of a computation to a user, such as a display, or to another
computer.
Liquid crystal display
A display technology using a thin layer of liquid polymers that can be used to transmit or block light
according to whether a charge is applied.
Active matrix display
A liquid crystal display using a transistor to control the transmission of light at each individual pixel.
, bit map
The image is composed of a matrix of picture elements, or pixels, which can be represented as a
matrix of bits, called a bit map.
Pixel
The smallest individual picture element. Screens are composed of hundreds of thousands to millions
of pixels, organized in a matrix
frame buffer
The computer hardware support for graphics consists mainly of a raster refresh buffer, or frame
buffer, to store the bit map.
Integrated circuit
Also called a chip. A device combining dozens to millions of transistors.
Central processor unit (CPU)
Also called processor. The active part of the computer, which contains the datapath and control and
which adds numbers, tests numbers, signals I/O devices to activate, and so on.
Datapath
The component of the processor that performs arithmetic operations.
information revolution
Computers have led to a third revolution for civilization, with the information revolution taking its
place alongside the agricultural and the industrial revolutions.
Personal computer
A computer designed for use by an individual, usually incorporating a graphics display, a keyboard,
and a mouse.
Server
A computer used for running larger programs for multiple users, often simultaneously, and typically
accessed only via a network.
Supercomputer
A class of computers with the highest performance and cost; they are congured as servers and
typically cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Embedded computer
A computer inside another device used for running one predetermined application or collection of
software.
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.
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