Chapter 2: Hardware Designed to Meet the Need

Bits aren’t really 1’s and 0’s, they are devices that can be set to one of two states.

Eight bits is a byte – the standard grouping in digital electronics.

American Standard Code for Information Interchange(ASCII). Code representing keyboard text characters

Digital convergence is the trend to merge multiple digital services into one device.

also known as CPU

Storage is the ability to maintain data within the system permanently or temporarily.

Primary circuit board of a computing device. CPU, system storage, system bus are on the motherboard.

Central processing unit(CPU), it is a group of integrated circuits that perform processing.

also called chips. It is used to store and process bits and bytes in today's computers.

Composed of semiconducting material that opens or closes a circuit.

Arithmetic/logic unit (ALU), it contains the circuitry to carry out instructions, such as mathematical and logical operations.

The control unit sequentially accesses and decodes program instructions, decodes them, and coordinates flow of data in and out of ALU.

Registers hold the bytes currently being processed.

Recent CPU contains L1 and L2 cache.

Measured in megahertz (MHz) or gigahertz (GHz)

Used to market processors instead of clock speed

High-speed memory a processor can access more quickly than RAM

Number of bits that a CPU can process at once

FSB is now replaced by QPI (QuickPath Interconnect) in Core i CPU.

Produces a series of electronic pulses at a predetermined rate called clock speed

-More precise than MIPS -Gigaflop, teraflop

Amount of time it takes to execute an instruction

Random access memory(RAM). Temporary, or volatile, memory that stores bytes of data and program instructions for the processor to access.

The system bus connects the CPU to the chipset, and through it to RAM and other components on the motherboard.

System storage is storage that is used by a computer system for standard operations.

RAM stands for Random Access Memory.Also known as memory or primary (main) storage.

requires power to maintain the stored information

Random access (sometimes called direct access) is the ability to access an arbitrary element of a sequence in equal time. The opposite is sequential access, where a remote element takes longer time to access.

Graphics memory, sometimes called video RAM or VRAM, is used to store image data for a computer display in order to speed the processing and display of video images.

Read-only memory (ROM) Provides permanent storage for data and instructions.

- Semi-permanent storage for information that may change- Able to keep accurate time and date even when computer is shut down

used to store data more permanently without the need for electricity.

Magnetic storage devices use the magnetic properties of iron oxide particles to store bits and bytes more permanently than RAM.

Magnetic storage devices use the magnetic properties of iron oxide particles to store bits and bytes more permanently than RAM.

Portable, low-capacity, direct storage medium (out-dated)

Tiny hard drives that store data on a small disk

Uses optical laser to burn pits into the surface of a highly reflective disk

Compact disk read-only memory(CD-ROM): Optical media that stores up to 700 MB of data.

Digital video disk read-only memory(DVD-ROM): stores over 4.7GB of data

Able to read smaller pits, which allows for greater capacity

Solid state storage devices store data using transistors. Also store the data without the need for electricity.

Keeps its memory when the power is shut down

Also known as USB thumb driveConvenient, portable, high-capacity storage

An input device assists in capturing and entering raw data into the computer system.

An output device allows you to observe the results of computer processing with one or more of your senses.

Most popular today, up to 480 Gb/s

New USB standard and it is about 10 times faster than USB 2.0

Also known as IEEE 1394 or iLink

About the same speed as USB 2.0

New Firewire standard