Monday, November 28, 2011

Meaningful illustration of Andrew S. Tanenbaum





The trend of Computers Nowadays is developing as fast as the wind that blows. It has different fields of potential which people use to love it. Codes, algorithm, Software and hardware are highly related to the field of Computer Science. The world of Computer Science is very wide in which it should be organized and categorized.  The Structured Computer Organization is one of the categories in Computer Science which made by Andrew S. Tanenbaum. He made a book entitled Structured Computer Organization which many people wonder what is the meaning behind his illustration.

The dog signifies a cache which is used to speed up certain computer operations by temporarily placing data, or a copy of it, in a location where it can be accessed faster than normal. The one driving a bike is similar to a PCI Express which is used in consumer, server, and industrial applications, as a motherboard-level interconnect and as an expansion card interface for add-in boards. The man selling newspaper is like a media processor. It is a microprocessor-based system-on-a-chip which is designed to deal with digital streaming data in real-time rates. The blue pants of the man symbolize a Bluegene which is a means a computer architecture project designed to produce several supercomputers. When computing, a pipeline is a set of data processing elements connected in series, so that the output of one element is the input of the next one.


The first floor is the digital logic level, which is the computer's real hardware. This is a building block for the higher levels. It is composed of Dynamic RAM. It is a type of RAM that only holds its data if it is continuously accessed by special logic called a refresh circuit. We can also find Static RAM which is a type of RAM that holds its data without external refresh, for as long as power is supplied to the circuit. In digital circuits, a flip-flop is an electronic circuit that has two stable states and thereby is capable of serving as a one-bit memory cell. A flip-flop is usually controlled by one or two control signals and/or a gate or clock signal. The output often includes the complement as well as the normal output. The 1 Hz clock signal is derived from a higher frequency oscillator using a divider circuit, and a reset circuit within the date and time clock clears the divider circuit each time data is stored in the register.


The second floor is the microarchitecture level. The Instruction (ISA) is implemented on a processor. A given ISA may be implemented with different microarchitectures. In electronics, an adder or summer is a digital circuit that performs addition of numbers. An interpreter normally means a computer program that executes, i.e. performs, instructions written in a programming language.


The third floor is ISA Level. It is positioned between the microarchitecture level and the operating system level. It is the interface between the software and the hardware. The mouse represents a computer mouse. It is used to tell a computer what to do, including moving the cursor and choosing things on the screen. The trap can also be called as Interrupt. Interrupts enable software to respond to signals from hardware. It may be initiated by a running process of synchronous with the operation of the process. Embedded computers are incorporated into other devices, rather than being stand alone computers. The Pentium 4 is a brand that refers to Intel's line of single-core desktop and laptop central processing units (CPUs) introduced on November 20, 2000 and shipped through August 8, 2008.


The fourth floor is the operating system (OS) level. It is a kind of software consisting of programs and data that runs on computers and manages the computer hardware and provides common services for efficient execution of various applications software. Microsoft Windows is a series of software operating systems and graphical user interfaces produced by Microsoft. The Race (Random Access Card Equipment) is an early magnetic card mass storage device from RCA that was used with its IBM-compatible Spectra 70 mainframes. The units read and wrote data on a deck of 4x18" cards with a magnetic recording surface.


The last floor is the Assembly Language Level. An assembly language is a low-level programming language for computers, microprocessors, microcontrollers, and other integrated circuits. It implements a symbolic representation of the binary machine codes and other constants needed to program a given CPU architecture. A high-level programming language is a programming language with strong abstraction from the details of the computer. In comparison to low-level programming languages, it may use natural language elements, be easier to use, or be more portable across platforms while low-level programming language is a programming language that provides little or no abstraction from a computer's instruction set architecture. A loader is the part of an operating system that is responsible for loading programs, one of the essential stages in the process of starting a program, it means loader is a program that places programs into memory and prepares them for execution.


The man who is assembling acts like an Assembler in a computer. Assemblers are generally simpler to write than compilers for high-level languages. The thunder cloud is like an UltraSPARC which is a microprocessor developed by Sun Microsystems and fabricated by Texas Instruments that implements the SPARC V9 instruction set architecture (ISA).


The spaceship or alien represents a parallel processing which has the ability to carry out multiple operations or tasks simultaneously. The term is used in the context of human cognition, particularly in the ability of the brain to simultaneously process incoming stimuli, and in parallel computing by machines. This becomes most important in vision, as the brain divides what it sees into four components: color, motion, shape, and depth.


Branch predictor is a digital circuit that tries to guess which way a branch (e.g. an if-then-else structure) will go before this is known for sure. The purpose of the branch predictor is to improve the flow in the instruction pipeline. 




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