COIS 1010H- Final Exam Guide - Comprehensive Notes for the exam ( 99 pages long!)
28 Mar 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Trent
COIS 1010H
Final EXAM
STUDY GUIDE
Thursday, September 7, 2017
COIS 1010H Lec 1: Hardware
Intro
-We’ll never be tested on things that are in the book and not in lecture (e.g., lecture
material only).
Inside the system unit
-CPU (central processing unit) and memory are the two most important parts.
-Motherboard is the main component that holds it all together.
-Graphics cards make computers work much faster (not only for gaming). They are
powerful and come very cheap.
-Cloud computing. The idea of using servers (large powerful computer) elsewhere that
are shared among a community of users. You can rent time on these computers
(researchers do this). This idea is similar to what was going on in the 60’s (people
paying time to rent access to these servers to run calculations).
!1
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Thursday, September 7, 2017
The CPU
-On a chip, we now have multiple cores.
-The typical tasks that the cores are taking on
are not necessarily easy to share (e.g., one
core doing the downloading, one core doing
the emails).
-Nowadays we tend to get computers that
have lots of cores but it’s hard to actually use
all of those.
-Manufacturers have reduced the speed at
which the cores work (less heat, less
damage to the system) but add lots of
cores.
-Hyperthreading means that cores can do more than one thing but it takes turns
doing it.
-RAM memory is stuff that when your computer is turned off, it’s gone. Whereas the
data stored on the hard drive is remembered when the computer is turned off.
Processing speed
-CPU clock speed: One measurement of processing speed.
•Measured in Megahertz (MHz) or Gigahertz (GHz).
•Higher CPU clock speed = more instructions processed per second.
-Alternate measure of processing speed is the number of instructions a CPU can
process per second.
•Megaflops, Gigaflops, Teraflops.
•FLOPS (floating operations per second)
-Other factors also affect the overall processing speed of a computer:
•CPU architecture, memory, bus speed, amount of RAM, etc.
!2
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
We"ll never be tested on things that are in the book and not in lecture (e. g. , lecture material only). Cpu (central processing unit) and memory are the two most important parts. Motherboard is the main component that holds it all together. Graphics cards make computers work much faster (not only for gaming). The idea of using servers (large powerful computer) elsewhere that are shared among a community of users. You can rent time on these computers (researchers do this). This idea is similar to what was going on in the 60"s (people paying time to rent access to these servers to run calculations). On a chip, we now have multiple cores. The typical tasks that the cores are taking on are not necessarily easy to share (e. g. , one core doing the downloading, one core doing the emails). Nowadays we tend to get computers that have lots of cores but it"s hard to actually use all of those.
