Ch3 Core Hardware

Question 1

What does the size/width of a bus mean?

Answer 1

How many bits it carries in parallel. Ours is 16 bits for the instruction bus and 8 bit for the data bus

Question 2

What is the speed of a bus?

Answer 2

Its how fast it moves data along the path

Question 3

What is RAM?

Answer 3

Random access memory. Allows data items to be read or written in almost the same amount of time irrespective of the physical location. Normally volatile.

Question 4

What is flash memory

Answer 4

non volatile memory that retains data in the absence of a power supply

Question 5

Difference between instruction and data bus?

Answer 5

Address bus: dedicated for specifying a physical address.

Data bus: simply carries data

Data bus is bidirectional and address bus is unidirectional.

Question 6

What is ALU?

Answer 6

An arithmetic logic unit (ALU) is a digital circuit used to perform arithmetic and logic operations

Question 7

What is a lookup table?

Answer 7

Array that replaces runtime computation with a simpler array indexing operation. Can save processing time.