Microprocessors and Computers

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Microprocessors and Computers
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Microprocessor

• The microprocessor is the heart of any normal
  computer
• The microprocessor you are using might be a
  Pentium, a K6, a PowerPC, a Sparc or any of the
  many other brands and types of microprocessors,
  but they all do approximately the same thing in
  approximately the same way.
• A microprocessor -- also known as a CPU or
  central processing unit -- is a complete
  computation engine that is fabricated on a single
  chip
• Higher level of digital abstraction

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Computers and microprocessor

• The first microprocessor was the Intel 4004,
  introduced in 1971. The 4004 was not very
  powerful can only add and subtract 4 bits at a
  time.
• Microprocessor is the brain of a computer
• Intel 8080 chip based 8-bit computer, introduced
  in 1974 first computer
• A computer is a general purpose tool built around
  a microprocessor. It has lots of different parts
  -- memory, a hard disk, a modem, etc. -- that
  work together.

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Computers and microprocessor

• Basic elements of computers dont change that
  much since the time of Babbage. The important
  elements are central processing unit or CPU
  (ie. microprocessor) , memory, input/output
  devices or I/O and buses (address and data)

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Motherboard of a computer
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Elements in a computer - memory

• Memory can be viewed as holes that have
  addresses. Each hole can be filled with data,
  There need to be at least 2 data buses that
  communicate with the memory address bus and
  data bus. There is also an extra bus known as the
  control bus. Memory can either be ROM or RAM. In
  principle the size of the bus determines the size
  of memory. For a 32 bit bus, the memory that can
  be addressed are 232 or 4GB.
• There are different types of memory. In the CPU
  itself, there are registers and caches. In I/O,
  there are also registers and buffers.

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Elements I/O and ports

• Monitor - The monitor is the primary device for
  displaying information from the computer.
• Keyboard - The keyboard is the primary device for
  entering information into the computer.
• Mouse - The mouse is the primary device for
  navigating and interacting with the computer
• Removable storage - Removable storage devices
  allow you to add new information to your computer
  very easily, as well as save information that you
  want to carry to a different location.
• Parallel, Serial and USB ports

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Elements - microprocessor

• A microprocessor executes a collection of machine
  instructions that tell the processor what to do
• Based on the instructions, a microprocessor does
  three basic things
• Using its ALU (Arithmetic/Logic Unit), a
  microprocessor can perform mathematical
  operations like addition, subtraction,
  multiplication and division. Modern
  microprocessors contain complete floating point
  processors that can perform extremely
  sophisticated operations on large floating point
  numbers.
• A microprocessor can move data from one memory
  location to another.
• A microprocessor can make decisions and jump to a
  new set of instructions based on those decisions.
  

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How does a microprocessor work?

• There are many references in the internet on how
  microprocessors work.
• One of which is http//www.howstuffworks.com/micro
  processor.htm
• Lets follow the arguments given in the article on
  how a microprocessor works.
• A printout is also given that explains how a
  micoprocessor works

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More info

• The number of transistors available has a huge
  effect on the performance of a processor
• More transistors also allow for a technology
  called pipelining. In a pipelined architecture,
  instruction execution overlaps
• Many modern processors have multiple instruction
  decoders, each with its own pipeline
• The trend in processor design has primarily been
  toward full 32-bit ALUs with fast floating point
  processors built in and pipelined execution with
  multiple instruction streams
• There has also been a tendency toward special
  instructions (like the MMX instructions) that
  make certain operations particularly efficient,
  and the addition of hardware virtual memory
  support and L1 caching on the processor chip.
• Need more and more transistors!!!!

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Operating System

• The purpose of an operating system is to organize
  and control hardware and software so that the
  device behaves in a flexible but predictable way
  it is a resource manager. It resides in the
  memory when the computer is switched on (BIOS
  loads the OS into memory)
• OS function best understood in terms of layers

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OS

• The operating system's tasks, in the most general
  sense, fall into six categories
• Process management
• Memory management
• Device management
• Storage management
• Application interface
• User interface
• Excellent animation can be found at
• http//computer.howstuffworks.com/operating-system
  5.htm

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OS

• Not all devices with microprocessors need an
  operating system to run
• All PCs have OS Windows, Apple, Unix Linux
• There are a number of broad type of OS
• Real Time
• Single user, single task
• Single user, multi tasking
• Multiuser