Study Sheet - Chapter 2

Disclaimer: This study sheet covers important terms and concepts that I found in the text. The absence of a specific item in the text from this list does not mean that you are not responsible for knowing it. Also, not valid in Tennessee and for entertainment purposes only.

1. Processors

Terms:

Central Processing Unit (CPU)	Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU)	datapath	datapath cycle
register	Program Counter (PC)	Instruction Register (IR)
architecture	Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC)	Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC)	MIPS processor
microinstructions	control store, ROM	pipelining	stages
latency	processor bandwidth	superscalar architectures
array processor	vector processor	multiprocessor	multicomputer

You should understand:

The fetch-decode-execute interpreter/cycle
The RISC design principles
Hardware v. software (microinstructions) tradeoff
Instruction-level pipelining v. processor-level pipelining
The basics of instruction-level pipelining
The u pipeline and v pipeline of the Pentium chip
The myriad of processor-level parallelism options and their differences

2. Primary memory

Terms:

bit	byte	nibble
Binary Coded Digit (BCD)	cell	address	word
big endian	little endian
Hamming code	codeword	parity bit	Hamming distance
cache	locality principle	cache line	unified cache
split cache	Single Inline Memory Module (SIMM)	Double Inline Memory Module (DIMM)

You should understand:

Memory size, address size, word size and their relationships
Big endian v. little endian
Hamming codes
The relationship between the locality principle and caching
Calculating the mean access time using a cache

3. Secondary memory

Terms:

track	sector	preamble	inter-sector gap
Winchester disks	cylinder	seek/seek time	rotational latency
disk controller	Basic Input Output System (BIOS)	Integrated Device Electronics (IDE)	Extended IDE (EIDE)
Small Computer System Interface (SCSI)	Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)	striping	optical disk
pits	lands	frame	sector
Volume Table of Contents (VTOC)	sessions

You should understand:

The memory hierarchy pyramid
Magnetic disk workings
Basics of the 6 RAID levels
CD-ROM workings
Compare and contrast magnetic disks, CD-ROMs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs, DVDs

4. Input/output

Terms:

motherboard	I/O controller	Direct Memory Access (DMA)	interrupt
interrupt controller	bus arbiter	cycle stealing	Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus
Extended ISA (EISA) bus	Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI)
Cathode Ray Tube (CRT)	raster scan device
Liquid Crystal Display (LCD)	passive matrix display	active matrix display	video memory
character map terminal	bit map terminal	color palette	RS232-C terminal
Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (UART)	Light Emitting Diode (LED)	halftoning	Cyan Yellow Magenta Black (CYMK)
carrier	baud rate	bit rate	full duplex
half duplex	simplex	Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN)
American Standard Code for Information Interchage (ASCII)	Unicode	code point

You should understand:

3 flavors of mice: mechanical, optical, opto-mechanical
3 flavors of printer: matrix, inkjet, laser
Why is half-toning sometimes necessary?
How information is transmitted by a modem: amplitude mod, frequency mod, phase mod
ASCII and Unicode: compare and constrast