1. PROF. DANIEL ERNST FEBRUARY 28 TH, 2011 COMPUTER HARDWARE CS 146 The Big Picture in Computer Science

2. 2 What would you say is the greatest invention of the 20 th century? (ABC News poll, 1999) Top responses % Computers 30 Automobile 12 Electricity 9 Television 9 Telephone/Telecommunications 7 Airplane 4 Medicines/Vaccinations 4 “The transistor; without it, the XBOX would probably be the size of a city.” - nate66, some xbox forum ???

3. 3 Introduction of Microelectronics Miniaturization of immense proportions Transistor: This is an abbreviated combination of the words "transconductance" or "transfer", and "varistor". The device logically belongs in the varistor family, and has the transconductance or transfer impedance of a device having gain, so that this combination is descriptive.transconductancevaristor — Bell Telephone Laboratories — Technical Memorandum (May 28, 1948) Integrated Circuit: Miniaturized electronic circuit manufactured in a thin layer of semiconductor material.

4. 4 Moore’s Law

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6. 6 The Power of Miniaturization EDSAC 1 (1949) ~ 500 OPs Pentium 4 (2002) ~ 12 GFLOPs 24,000,000 times faster

7. 7 A picture is worth 1000 words… (or a billion transistors)

8. 8 Managing Complexity with Abstraction Designers deal with the extreme complexity of microprocessors by using abstraction.  Focus only on 1-2 levels of abstraction at a time  Similar to OOD Don’t need to know how the module works, just that it does work.  And the interface

9. 9 Levels of Abstraction in a Computer System Apps O/S Arch  Arch Logic Digital Analog Devices Physics software hardware Applications – Generic Software Operating System – Controlling Software Architecture – HW/SW Interface  architecture – High-level organization Digital Logic – Building-block Modules Digital Circuits – Continuous  Discrete Analog Circuits – Fun with Electricity Devices – Transistors, Capacitors, etc. Physical Properties – Electrons, Ions, etc.