Hardware

Question 1

What do registers do?

Answer 1

Store internal commands and data

Question 2

What is a CPUs clock speed measured in?

Answer 2

MHz and GHz

Question 3

4 bits =?

Answer 3

a nibble

Question 4

How many bits = a byte?

Answer 4

8 bits

Question 5

What type of RAM do computers use for main system memory?

Answer 5

dynamic RAM or DRAM

Question 6

What does an MCC do?

Answer 6

Grabs contents of any line of RAM and places that data or command on the EDB

Question 7

What does the address bus do?

Answer 7

Allows communication between CPU and MCC

Question 8

What are the three companies that create the vast majority of CPUs today?

Answer 8

• Intel
• AMD
• ARM

Question 9

List the 8 features of CPU technology.

Answer 9

1. Clock multipliers
2. 64-bit processing
3. virtualisation support
4. parallel execution
5. multicore processing
6. integrated memory controller (IMC)
7. GPU
8. security

Question 10

How much memory can 32-bit processing support?

Answer 10

4GB

Question 11

How much memory can 64-bit processing support?

Answer 11

16EB

Question 12

What are three things that CPUs accomplish parallelism?

Answer 12

1. pipelining
2. dedicated cache
3. multiple threads

Question 13

List the four stages of pipelining.

Answer 13

1. Fetch
2. Decode
3. Execute
4. Write

Question 14

Cache in CPU is what type of RAM?

Answer 14

Static RAM or SRAM

Question 15

What does cache prevent/reduce?

Answer 15

pipeline stalls/ wait states

Question 16

What is multithreading?

Whats the catch with multithreading?

Answer 16

Turning a CPU into two CPUs on one chip.
The catch is that this only works when the OS supports hyperthreading

Question 17

Which CPU uses PGA and which uses LGA?

What does PGA and LGA stand for?

Answer 17

• Intel uses LGA
• AMD uses PGA
• LGA = Land grid array, PGA = Pin grid array

Question 18

What does ZIF stand for?

Answer 18

zero insertion force

Question 19

Before inserting a heat sink what should you do?

Answer 19

add a small amount of thermal paste

Question 20

What are the two utilies for both Intel and AMD that help you oveclock their respective CPUs?

Answer 20

• Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (Intel XTU)
• AMD Overdrive Utility

Question 21

3 symptoms that can lead to overheating?

Answer 21

1. too much thermal paste which can impede the flow of heat from the CPU
2. not enough thermal paste or uneven spread of thermal paste
3. failure to connect fan power to the motherboard

Question 22

BSoD and Spinning pinwheel are two types of…

Answer 22

proprietary screen crashes

Question 23

What function does the EDB have in the PC?

Answer 23

provides a channel for the flow of data and commands between the CPU and RAM