Computer Architecture and Programming Languages
Posted on: April 17, 2011 at 12:00 AM
Posted on: April 17, 2011 at 12:00 AM
This page discusses - Computer Architecture and Programming Languages
Computer Architecture and Programming Languages
- CPU - Central Processing Unit - The "brains" that performs the computations.
- Main Memory - Where everything must be for the CPU to use it.
- Input and Output - Devices used to enter or display information.
- Storage - A disk (or similar device) for saving programs and data.
- IFSM 310 is an entire course about computer architecture.
Main Memory / RAM
- Main memory is also known as RAM (Random Access Memory)
- To run any program, it must be loaded from the disk into RAM.
- RAM is volatile - All memory is lost when the power is off.
- For something to be permanent, it must be written to a disk (storage).
- RAM is composed of bits.
Bits - Binary Digits
- A bit has two possible values: 0 or 1.
- Hardware representation: voltage, current, magnetic field, reflectivity, ...
- Everything is represented as bits. (numbers, characters, sound, images, program instructions, ...)
- Groups of 8 bits are called called bytes.
- A common size for RAM is 256 MB (megabytes).
- Each byte has an identifying address.
CPU - Central Processing Unit
- CPU is typically implemented as one chip.
- The CPU gets machine instructions from memory, and does them one at a time.
- An machine instruction contains an opcode that tells what to do and generally one or more operand addresses that specify what to do it to.
- Machine instructions are very small steps: eg, add the byte at location 253398 to the byte a location 84992 and store the result in byte 234344.
- The CPU is able to do these instructions very rapidly. A common