Question | Answer |
What is processing | The thinking the computer does, calculations, comparisons, and decisions.
What is meant by “all computers are digital” |
What is meant by “all computers are digital” | All info is stored as a string of zeros or ones - off or on. |
What is one on or off position | A bit |
Eight bits is equal to what | One byte |
What is the CPU | Central Processing Unit – where all the work gets done. (Most computers have one processing chip.) |
What is Main Memory | It stores the commands that the CPU executes and the results. |
Can a computer do more than one thing at a time | NO |
One round of steps from getting an instruction back to getting the next instruction is called what | The Machine Cycle |
List the machine cycle and what they do. | Fetch - get an instruction from Main Memory
Decode - translate it into computer commands
Execute - actually process the command
Store - write the result to Main Memo |
What is one way to measure a computers speed | MIPS, standing for millions of instructions per second |
A memory address holds 1 byte of data where a kilobyte is equal to and A megabyte is equal to | KB = 1024 bytes MB = 1024 kilobytes |
A processors speed is affected by: | System clock rate
Bus width
Word size |
What is system clock rate | The rate of an electronic pulse used to synchronize processing. |
How is a processors speed measured | megahertz (MHz) where 1 MHz = 1 million cycles per second or gigahertz (GHz) where 1 GHz = 1 billion cycles per second. |
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What is bus width | The amount of data the CPU can transmit at a time to main memory and to input and output devices.(Any path bits travel is a bus.) |
What is the word size | The amount of data the CPU can process at one time. |
What are the physical components of a computer that are directly involved in processing | The processor chip itself
the memory devices
the motherboard |
What is a single silicon chip containing CPU, ALU, and some memory. | A microprocessor |
ROM | Read Only Memory (permanent) |
RAM | Random Access Memory (temporary) |
Where is the microprocessor chip located | On the motherboard |
What are the two types of computer software | System
Application |
What is system software | The operating system such as Windows 7 or XP
(used by the computer) |
What is applications software | Used by people – Word, Excel, Access, FrontPage, Powerpoint, etc |