Computer Architecture and Organisation - Introduction

Practice flashcards covering the history of computing, the von Neumann architecture, computer generations, and the evolution of the Intel x86 microprocessor.

ENIAC

Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer; world's first general-purpose electronic digital computer, designed at the University of Pennsylvania and completed in $1946$.

John Mauchly and John Eckert

The designers and constructors of the ENIAC machine.

John von Neumann

The mathematician credited with the stored program concept and the design of the IAS computer.

Stored program concept

A form of computer architecture where program instructions and data are stored in the same memory.

IAS computer

A prototype general-purpose computer begun in $1946$ at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies and completed in $1952$.

Arithmetic and logic unit (ALU)

The component of the IAS computer responsible for operating on binary data.

Control unit

The component of the IAS computer that interprets instructions in memory and causes them to be executed.

Memory buffer register (MBR)

A register that contains a word to be stored in memory or sent to the I/O unit, or is used to receive a word from memory or from the I/O unit.

Memory address register (MAR)

A register that specifies the address in memory of the word to be written from or read into the MBR.

Instruction register (IR)

Contains the $8$-bit opcode instruction being executed.

Instruction buffer register (IBR)

Employed to temporarily hold the right-hand instruction from a word in memory.

Program counter (PC)

Contains the address of the next instruction pair to be fetched from memory.

Accumulator (AC) and multiplier quotient (MQ)

Registers employed to temporarily hold operands and results of ALU operations.

UNIVAC I

Universal Automatic Computer; the first successful commercial computer, commissioned by the US Bureau of Census for $1950$ calculations.

Second Generation: Transistors

Computers that used solid-state silicon devices (invented in $1947$ at Bell Labs) resulting in smaller, cheaper machines that dissipated less heat than vacuum tubes.

Integrated Circuit (IC)

Invented in $1958$, it allows many transistors to be fabricated on a single wafer of silicon, marking the beginning of the third generation.

Gate

A device that implements a simple Boolean or logical function, such as an AND gate.

Memory cell

A device that can store one bit of data in one of two stable states.

Moore’s Law

An observation by Gordon Moore in $1965$ that the number of transistors on a single chip doubles every year (revised in the $1970$s to every $18$ months).

Intel 4004

The first microprocessor, developed in $1971$, containing all components of a CPU on a single chip.

Pipelining

A processor speed technique where data or instructions move through a conceptual pipe with all stages processing simultaneously.

Branch prediction

A technique where the processor looks ahead in instruction code and predicts which branches are likely to be processed next.

Speculative execution

Executing instructions ahead of their actual appearance in the program execution using branch prediction and data flow analysis.

CISC

Complex Instruction Set Computers, an architecture style exemplified by the Intel x86 series.

RISC

Reduced Instruction Set Computer, an architecture style exemplified by the ARM architecture.

Intel 80386

Intel’s first $32$-bit machine and the first Intel processor to support multitasking.

Intel Core

The first Intel x86 microprocessor with a dual core, implementing two processors on a single chip.