Exam 5: Computer Systems Organization

What is the most fundamental characteristic of the Von Neumann architecture?

The ____ are the devices that allow a computer system to communicate and interact with the outside world as well as store information.

The Memory Data Register contains the address of the cell being fetched or stored. _________________________

As computers become faster, memory access speeds are keeping pace.

The instructions that can be decoded and executed by the control unit of a computer are represented in machine language.

What is cluster computing?

To solve the difficulty of scaling memory organization, memories are physically organized into a ____-dimensional organization.

A cache is typically ____ times faster than RAM but much smaller.

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

MIMD parallelism is a scalable architecture. _________________________

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

Explain at length what scalability means.

The first computer to achieve a speed of 1 million floating-point operations per second, 1 ____________________, was the Control Data 6600 in the mid-1960s.

When a computer needs a piece of information, does it immediately perform the memory fetch operation? If not, what does it do?

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

____ machines are designed to directly provide a wide range of powerful features so that finished programs for these processors are shorter.

Both RAM and ROM are memory chips into which information has been prerecorded during manufacture.

The three parts of the ALU together are known as the ____________________.

Memory locations are stored in row major order.

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