Computer Architecture WGU C952
Midterm Exam 100% Well Answered.
information revolution - Answer Computers have led to a third revolution for civilization, with the
_________________ taking its place alongside the agricultural and the industrial revolutions.
Personal Computer (PC) - Answer A computer designed for use by an individual, usually incorporating a
graphics display, a keyboard, and a mouse.
Server - Answer A computer used for running larger programs for multiple users, often simultaneously,
and typically accessed only via a network.
Supercomputer - Answer 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 - Answer A computer inside another device used for running one predetermined
application or collection of software.
processor cores - Answer Many embedded processors are designed using ______________, a version
of a processor written in a hardware description language, such as Verilog or VHDL.
Personal mobile devices (PMDs) - Answer 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 (WSCs) - Answer Taking over from the conventional server is Cloud
Computing, which relies upon giant datacenters that are now known as__________________________
Cloud computing - Answer 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) - Answer 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: - Answer A microprocessor containing multiple processors ("cores") in a
single integrated circuit.
Terabyte (TB): - Answer 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) - Answer To reduce confusion, we now use the term _______________ for 240 bytes,
defining terabyte (TB) to mean 1012 bytes.
Moore's Law
. - Answer __________________ states that integrated circuit resources double every 18-24 months
abstractions - Answer A major productivity technique for hardware and software is to
use________________ to characterize the design at different levels of representation; lower-level details
are hidden to offer a simpler model at higher levels.
common case - Answer Making the________________ fast will tend to enhance performance better
than optimizing the rare case.
parallel - Answer Since the dawn of computing, computer architects have offered designs that get more
performance by computing operations in _______________.
pipelining - Answer A particular pattern of parallelism is so prevalent in computer architecture that it
merits its own name: _______________ , which moves multiple operations through hardware units that
each do a piece of an operation, akin to water flowing through a pipeline.
prediction - Answer The idea of _________________ 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 memories - Answer 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 - Answer 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 - Answer Software that provides services that are commonly useful, including
operating systems, compilers, loaders, and assemblers.
Operating system - Answer Supervising program that manages the resources of a computer for the
benefit of the programs that run on that computer.
Compiler - Answer A program that translates high-level language statements into assembly language
statements.
binary numbers - Answer 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 - Answer Also called a bit. One of the two numbers in base 2 (0 or 1) that are the
components of information.
Instruction - Answer A command that computer hardware understands and obeys
Assembler - Answer A program that translates a symbolic version of instructions into the binary
version.
Assembly language - Answer A symbolic representation of machine instructions.
Machine language - Answer A binary representation of machine instructions.
