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Computer Architecture C952 Exam Questions with Complete Solutions Graded A+
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Computer Architecture C952 Exam Questions with Complete Solutions Graded A+
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ComputerArchitecture C952
Exam Questions
and Complete
Solutions Graded
Denning [Date] [Course title]
,information revolution - Answer: Computers have led to a third revolution for civilization, with the ?
taking its place alongside the agricultural and the industrial revolutions.
Personal computer - Answer: A computer designed for use by an individual, usually incorporating a
graphics display, a keyboard, and a mouse.
Personal Computer - Answer: PC (computer)
Server - Answer: A computer used for running larger programs for multiple users, often simultaneously,
and typically accessed only via a network.
Supercomputer - Answer: A class of computers with the highest performance and cost; they are
configured as servers and typically cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Embedded computer - Answer: A computer inside another device used for running one predetermined
application or collection of software.
processor cores - Answer: Many embedded processors are designed using ?, a version of a processor
written in a hardware description language, such as Verilog or VHDL.
Personal mobile devices (PMDs) - Answer: small wireless devices to connect to the Internet; they rely on
batteries for power, and software is installed by downloading apps. Conventional examples are smart
phones and tablets.
Personal Mobile Devices - Answer: PMDs
Warehouse Scale Computers - Answer: Taking over from the conventional server is Cloud Computing,
which relies upon giant datacenters that are now known as ?
Cloud computing - Answer: refers to large collections of servers that provide services over the Internet;
some providers rent dynamically varying numbers of servers as a utility.
,Software as a Service (SaaS) - Answer: delivers software and data as a service over the Internet, usually
via a thin program such as a browser that runs on local client devices, instead of binary code that must
be installed, and runs wholly on that device. Examples include web search and social networking.
Multicore microprocessor - Answer: A microprocessor containing multiple processors ("cores") in a
single integrated circuit.
Acronym - Answer: A word constructed by taking the initial letters of a string of words. For example:
RAM is an acronym for Random Access Memory, and CPU is an acronym for Central Processing Unit.
Terabyte (TB) - Answer: Originally 1,099,511,627,776 (240) bytes, although communications and
secondary storage systems developers started using the term to mean 1,000,000,000,000 (1012) bytes.
tebibyte (TiB) - Answer: To reduce confusion, we now use the term ? for 240 bytes, defining terabyte
(TB) to mean 1012 bytes.
Moore's Law - Answer: States that integrated circuit resources double every 18-24 months.
abstractions - Answer: A major productivity technique for hardware and software is to use ? to
characterize the design at different levels of representation; lower-level details are hidden to offer a
simpler model at higher levels.
common case - Answer: Making the ? fast will tend to enhance performance better than optimizing the
rare case.
parallel - Answer: Since the dawn of computing, computer architects have offered designs that get more
performance by computing operations in ?.
pipelining - Answer: A particular pattern of parallelism that is so prevalent in computer architecture.
Moves multiple operations through hardware units that each do a piece of an operation, akin to water
flowing through a pipeline.
, prediction - Answer: The idea of ? is that, in some cases it can be faster on average to guess and start
working rather than wait until you know for sure, assuming that the mechanism to recover from a
misprediction is not too expensive and your ? is relatively accurate.
hierarchy of memories - Answer: Architects have found that they can address conflicting demands of
fast, large, and cheap memory with a ?, with the fastest, smallest, and most expensive memory per bit
at the top of the ? and the slowest, largest, and cheapest per bit at the bottom.
dependable - Answer: Since any physical device can fail, we make systems ? by including redundant
components that can take over when a failure occurs and to help detect failures.
Systems software - Answer: Software that provides services that are commonly useful, including
operating systems, compilers, loaders, and assemblers.
Operating system - Answer: Supervising program that manages the resources of a computer for the
benefit of the programs that run on that computer.
Compiler - Answer: A program that translates high-level language statements into assembly language
statements.
binary numbers - Answer: The two symbols for these two letters are the numbers 0 and 1, and we
commonly think of the computer language as numbers in base 2, or ?.
Binary digit - Answer: Also called a bit. One of the two numbers in base 2 (0 or 1) that are the
components of information.
bit - Answer: Also called a binary digit. One of the two numbers in base 2 (0 or 1) that are the
components of information.
Instruction - Answer: A command that computer hardware understands and obeys.
Assembler - Answer: A program that translates a symbolic version of instructions into the binary version.
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