Hardware and Software Basics Shirley Moore and Kay Roy CS 1401 Spring 2013 January 24/28, 2013

Today’s Agenda Syllabus discussion (5 min) Qualtrics survey results (3 min) History of Computing recap (7 min) Sharing of computer history timeline information (15 min) Computers and Computational Processes lecture/discussion/demo (40 min) Reflection (5 min) Special guest (5 min)

Computational Process What is a computational process? What is not a computational process? – Calculating final grades for a class – Reading a book – Changing gears in an automatic transmission car – Learning to ride a bicycle – Solving a system of linear equations – Solving a math word problem – Playing chess

Restricted Over-simplified Definition A computational process takes input and manipulates it by executing a sequence of instructions to produce output.

Von Neumann Architecture Note that both instructions and data are stored in memory. What of the above is true for today’s computers? What of the above is an over-simplification for today’s computers?

Execution of a Computational Process by a von Neumann Computer 1Load program into memory 2Repeat until done (fetch-decode-execute cycle) a.Fetch instruction into control unit b.Decode instruction c.Execute instruction (e.g., read value from memory, arithmetic operation, write value to memory, read from input device, write to output device) Do demo at computing.net/html/FlashMovies/FE_cycle.htmhttp://ib- computing.net/html/FlashMovies/FE_cycle.htm

Learn the Lingo! Bits and Bytes – Computing Units – When kilo ≠1000 – 1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes – Why?

Intel CPU Trends

Moore’s Law Moore, Gordon E. (1965). "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits”, Electronics Magazine."Cramming more components onto integrated circuits”

Dual-core Processor Image from Wikipedia Commons

Dual core: 2 x 3 GHz < 6 GHz Why? When is a second core useful? When does a second core NOT help?

Intel Sandy Bridge Processor Image from The Register _ep_xeons/page3.html

Sandy Bridge Core Microarchitecture Image from

Why Multicore? Advantages Disadvantages