CSE 381 Unit 1 - Fundamentals Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms, architectural definitions, and quantitative performance metrics from CSE 381 Unit 1 Fundamentals.

ENIAC

The first electronic computer, constructed in 1946, consisting of 17,000 vacuum tubes and capable of 5,000 calculations.

Instruction Set Architecture (ISA)

The hardware/software interface encompassing decisions regarding registers, memory addressing, addressing modes, instruction operands, available operations, control flow instructions, and instruction encoding.

Application Binary Interface (ABI)

The Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) combined with the system software interface.

Bandwidth

Also known as throughput, it is the total amount of work done in a given time.

Latency

Also known as response time, it is the time between the start and completion of an event.

Feature Size

The minimum physical dimension of a transistor or wire in the x or y dimension.

Yield

The proportion of working dies per wafer in integrated circuit manufacturing.

Wall Clock Time

The total execution time required to run a program, including processing, I/O, operating system overhead, and system idle time.

CPU Time

The actual time spent processing a given job, excluding I/O time and shares of time allocated to other jobs.

Clock Period

The duration of a single clock cycle in digital hardware.

Clock Frequency

Also known as clock rate, it is the number of clock cycles per second.

CPI (Cycles Per Instruction)

The average number of clock cycles required to execute an instruction for a given program or workload.

Thermal Design Power (TDP)

A measurement characterizing sustained power consumption used as a design target for processor cooling systems and power supplies.

SPEC CPU2006

A performance evaluation suite developed by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp that measures CPU elapsed time across selected programs and summarizes performance using the geometric mean of performance ratios.

Amdahl's Law

A principle stating that the overall performance enhancement achieved by improving a specific component is limited by the fraction of execution time that the improved component is actually used.

MIPS

Millions of Instructions Per Second; a measurement calculated as $\frac{\text{Instruction Count}}{\text{Execution Time} \times 10^6}$.

Sign Extension

The process of copying the most significant bit (sign bit) of a signed binary number into additional higher-order bits when copying to a larger data width to preserve its numerical value.