02 Computer Systems

Question 1

“Brain” of the computer.

Answer 1

Central Processing Unit (CPU)

Question 2

Connects the components to the CPU through parallel wires used to transmit data and control signals.

Answer 2

bus

Question 3

Small but high-speed memory

Answer 3

Registers

Question 4

Most important register.

Answer 4

Program Counter

Question 5

Holds the instruction currently being executed.

Answer 5

Instruction Register

Question 6

Consists of Registers (1-32)

Answer 6

Data path

Question 7

Allows units of data (word) from the memory to be fetched by registers and used as ALU inputs.

Answer 7

Register-memory

Question 8

Fetches data from the register.

Answer 8

Register-register

Question 9

The CPU executes instructions as a series of small steps called _____.

Answer 9

fetch-decode-execute cycle

Question 10

RISC stands for? CISC refers to?

Answer 10

Reduced Instruction Set Computer, Complex Instruction Set Computer

Question 11

Requires more steps to do what the counterpart does.

Answer 11

RISC

Question 12

Slower than its counterpart Set Computer.

Answer 12

CISC

Question 13

Design Principles for Modern Computers

Answer 13

All common instructions are directly executed by the hardware.
Maximize the rate at which instructions are used.
Instructions should be easy to decode.
Only LOADS and STORES should reference the memory.
Provide plenty of registers

Question 14

Refers to the cycles a CPU executes per second.

Answer 14

Clock speed

Question 15

Executing more than one instruction at once as a way to get more performance for a given clock speed

Answer 15

Parallelism

Question 16

Two forms of parallelism:

Answer 16

Instruction-level
Processor-level

Question 17

The _____ is a set of registers that store pre-fetched
instructions

Answer 17

prefetch buffer

Question 18

_____ divides instruction execution to many parts where each one is handled by a dedicated hardware running in parallel.

Answer 18

Pipelining

Question 19

Builds on top of single pipelines where processors could execute multiple instructions in one clock cycle.

Answer 19

Superscalar Architectures

Question 20

The _____ consists of many identical processors that perform the same sequence of instructions on different sets of data.

Answer 20

Single Instruction-stream Multiple Data-stream (SIMD)

Question 21

Similar to SIMD but incorporates the concept of pipelining.

Answer 21

Vector processor

Question 22

More than one CPU sharing a common memory

Answer 22

Multiprocessors

Question 23

Systems consisting of large numbers of interconnected computers, each
with its own private memory, but no common memory

Answer 23

Multicomputer

Question 24

Is the part of the computer where programs and data are stored.

Answer 24

Memory

Question 25

A _____ or binary digit is the basic unit of memory.

Answer 25

bit

Question 26

Memories consists of _____ or _____ that store a piece of information.

Answer 26

cells, locations

Question 27

Each cell is identified by a number called its _____used by programs as reference.

Answer 27

address

Question 28

Composed of 8 bits.

Answer 28

byte

Question 29

group of bytes are called?

Answer 29

word

Question 30

4 bytes/word, 8 bytes/word

Answer 30

32 bit, 64 bit

Question 31

Byte Ordering: left-to-right: ___? right-to-left:___?

Answer 31

big endian, little endian

Question 32

A small amount of fast memory used with a large amount of slowmemory.

Answer 32

Cache memory

Question 33

The _____ brings a referenced word and some of its neighbors from the memory to the cache for faster access.

Answer 33

locality principle

Question 34

Caches are divided into fixed-size blocks (similar to main memory) called _____.

Answer 34

Cache lines