Exam 5: Computer Systems Organization

Draw an analogy between cache memory and a home refrigerator.

What is random access memory, and what are its three characteristics?

The Von Neumann bottleneck is the inability of the sequential one-instruction-at-a-time computer Von Neumann model to handle today's large-scale problems.

The normal mode of operation of a Von Neumann machine is sequential. _________________________

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

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

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.

Other than clock speed, what is an accurate measure of machine speed?

The ____ of a disk is the time for the beginning of the desired sector to rotate under the read/write head.

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