CSCI 551 Chapter Notes -Petabyte, Computer Hardware, Kilobyte
Document Summary
Everyone has some level of familiarity with computers and computing devices just as everyone has familiarity with automotive basics. However, just because you drive a car everyday doesn"t mean you can tell the difference between a crankshaft and a piston. To get started, let"s familiarize ourselves with some basic concepts. A computer is a device, usually electronic, that stores, receives, processes, and outputs information. Modern computing devices include everything from simple sensors to mobile devices, tablets, desktops, mainframes/servers, supercomputers and huge grid clusters consisting of multiple computers networked together. Computer processors are complex electronic circuits (referred to as very large scale inte- gration (vlsi)) which contain thousands of microscopic electronic transistors electronic. Gates that can perform logical operations and complex instructions. In addition to the cpu a processor may contain an arithmetic and logic unit (alu) that performs arithmetic operations such as addition, multiplication, division, etc.
