Flashcards
1) What is computer hardware?
Cards in this deck (24)
- 1In a PC there are 2 chip sets, the northbridge and southbridge. What's the difference?Northbridge-handles fast communications (CPU, memory, graphics)
Southbridge-handles slower communications (external hard disks, mouse, keyboard, printer) - 2What are the 2 main components of an integrated circuit?Transistors interconnected by microscopic wires
- 3What is the current trend in microprocessor design to overcome difficulties with power dissipation as we build faster and single processors?Multi-core processors where 1 CPU with a high clock speed is replaced with a number of CPUs with lower clock speeds which can give better computational power when working together
- 4What is Moore's Law?Long term transistor capacity doubles every 18-24 months
- 5What is a Boolean function and what is so special about NOT AND and OR gates?A Boolean function is a function f:{0,1}^n→{0,1}
We can build a circuit to compute any Boolean function with these gates - 6What is a NAND gate?NAND gate=takes 2 inputs and outputs 0, if and only if both inputs are 1.
- 7What are a half-adder and full-adder?A half adder takes x and y as inputs and computes the Boolean sum of x and y, where the Boolean sum of a collection of inputs is 1, if and only if, an odd number of the inputs are 1, and also the resulting carry bit which is 1, if and only if, both x and y are 1.
- 8Explain the basic principle behind using half-adders and full-adders to build a circuit that computes the sum of two n-bit strings of 0s and 1s.Let the two n-bit strings be X1X2 . . .Xn and Y1Y2 . . . Yn. A half-adder takes X1 and Y1 as input and outputs the sum, with the carry fed into a full-adder. This full-adder also has inputs X2 and Y2 and its sum is output, with its carry fed into a full-adder. This full-adder also has X3 and Y3 as inputs and its sum is output, with its carry fed into a full-adder, and so on. Both the sum and the carry of the final full-adder are output.
- 9What are the three fundamental phases of integrated circuit design?1) A function specification of the chip is derived: describes exactly what IC is supposed to do involving factors like power, speed, cost
2) The register transfer level (RTL) design is undertaken: describes exact behaviour of circuits on the chip
3) RTL design is mapped to a physical layout in silicon: need appropriate spacing between transistors - 10What is the ultimate aim of research in formal methods?To mathematically prove properties of designs so as not just to rely on empirical testing
- 11Name 2 attributes of computer hardware that are normally expressible in a hardware description languageUnlike normal programming language, HDL includes explicit notations for expressing time and concurrency which are primary attributes of computer hardware
- 12Name 3 key components in CPU microarchitecture1) The data path-performs all data processing operations and includes arithmetic logic unit (ALU)
2)Control-tells the data path, memory, and I/O devices what to do
3)Cache-small, fast and relatively cheap on-chip memory, used to store regularly accessed memory - 13Name 2 types of bus in a CPU and explain the purpose of eachData bus-carries the contents of memory locations between the processor and main memory
Address bus-Holds addresses of locations in main memory - 14What is the width of a bus?The width of a bus is the number of parallel wires in a bus.
- 15What is the von Neumann bottleneck? Which component of a modern CPU did the bottleneck give rise to?von Neumann bottleneck=a limitation of the rate of data transfer between CPU and memory
Gave rise to the use of caches. - 16How does Harvard architecture differ from von Neumann architecture?Harvard architecture has memory partitioned into data memory and instruction memory with dedicated buses for each of them
- 17Explain the difference between a byte and a word in relation to computer architecture. How is the size of a word related to the width of a bus?1 byte of storage contains 8 bits. A word is a number of bytes, and is the amount of data that can be handled by a processor as one unit. The width of the bus determines the word size
- 18What is a basic principle as regards different types of memory and distance from CPU?The cost and performance of memory is proportion to distance from CPU
- 19What is the difference between dynamic and static RAM?Dynamic (DRAM)=data is stored using transistor/capacitor combination
Static (SRAM)=data us stored by a flip dlop, incorporating transistors
Static is stable+fast, dynamic is cheap and slow - 20What is the purpose of cache memory in a CPU?Caches are expensive memory used to stored rapidly accessed items
- 21What are registers in the CPU?On-chip memory locations that are limited in number but the fastest way to access data
- 22Explain the 4 phases of the fetch-decode-fetch-execute processor cycleInstruction fetch-involves the supply of instruction address and the return from memory of the instruction
Instruction decode- involves interpreting the stored instruction within the CPU.
Operand fetch-involves the supply of the address of any required data and the return from memory of this data.
Execute instruction-involves the CPU performing the necessary actions - 23Explain the fundamental difference between multi-core computing and GPGPU computingMulti-core-More than one processor is integrated on one IC
GPGPU-Uses processors with graphics processing unit to compute rather than deal with screen pixels - 24Give illustrations of principles of Computational Thinking in the context of hardware‘Processing in parallel’ in multi-core or GPGPU computing. ‘Using abstraction and decomposition in tackling a large complex task’ in IC design and computer system design. ‘Prefetching and caching in anticipation of future use’ in caching within CPUs. ‘Interpreting code as data and data as code’ in processor architectures.
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- Degree Engineering Flashcards on 1) What is computer hardware?, created by jeevanaujla97 on 30/05/2016.
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