COMPSCI 111 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Reduced Instruction Set Computing, Printed Circuit Board, Nvidia

• School: University of Auckland
• Department: Computer Science
• Course: COMPSCI 111
• Professor: Damir Azhar

Document Summary

Power supply: converts ac to lower dc voltage. Cpu: (cid:862)brai(cid:374)(cid:863) of co(cid:373)puter, follows instructions, speed. Computation speed in ops (operations per second) Clock speed (speed electrical signals pass through) in hz. Faster = more heat produced: cooling. Cooling fan, heat sink, water cooled, etc: can have several cores (2 8, power efficiency and heat are just as important as processor speed. Family of instruction set architectures for computer processors based on reduced instruction set computing (risc). Motherboard: main circuit board for the computer, everything connects to motherboard. Expansion cards (inc graphics and io chips: circuit board providing additional functionality: Converts internal representation to display on monitor. Raid controller: plugged in using slots: Ram: primary/main memory, data lost when power turned off, size and speed important, access memory takes from 10 to 150 nanoseconds depending on hardware. Sram faster than dram: memory capacity in bytes. 1 byte = 1 ascii character in plain text.