Exam 5: Computer Systems Organization

The sectors of a disk are placed in concentric circles called cells.

What are the four major components of the Von Neumann architecture?

The ____ holds a copy of the instruction fetched from memory

The three parts of the ALU are together called the processor.

In the MIMD parallel processing model, there is a single program whose instructions are fetched/decoded/executed in a sequential manner by one control unit.

The ____ machine language instructions alter the normal sequential flow of control.

To understand how computers process information, we must study computers as collections of ____ that perform tasks such as information processing, information storage, computation, and data transfer functional units.

The ____ holds the address of the next instruction to be executed.

To alert the computer that an input/output operation is done, a(n) ____ is transmitted to the processor.

A(n) ____ handles the details of input/output and compensates for any speed differences between I/O devices and other parts of the computer.

The set of all operations that can be executed by a processor is called its I/O set.

System software is an intermediary between the assembly language and hardware components of the Von Neumann machine.

Registers can be accessed much more quickly than random access memory.

The acronym ____ is frequently used to refer to the memory unit of a computer.

The branch of computer science that studies computers in terms of their major functional units and how they work is known as computer organization.

Machine language instructions can be decoded and executed by the control unit of a computer.

In a ____, the original contents of the memory cell are unchanged.

The ____ operation in Von Neumann machines uses a special set of bits known as condition codes to represent the result of the operation.

In a parallel processing model, the control unit ____ instructions to every ALU.

A(n) ____ is a storage cell that holds the operands of an arithmetic operation and that, when the operation is complete, holds its result.