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Unit 1. Computer architecture
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Reading and discussing the problems of hardware and
Software
УДК
ББК
Искандарова О.Ю.
Читаем и обсуждаем проблемы компьютерной техники и программного обеспечения (на английском языке).
Учебно-методическое пособие. – М.: Изд-во МАКС Пресс, Москва 2011. – 131 с.
ISBN
Учебно-методическое пособие предназначено для профессионально-ориентированного чтения и коммуникации студентов, аспирантов неязыковых ВУЗов при проведении занятий по английскому языку по специальности «Компьютерная техника и программное обеспечение». Пособие включает десять уроков, которые состоят из оригинальных англоязычных текстов, коммуникативных упражнений, заданий к тексту и деловых игр и завершается приложением. Оно может быть полезно широкому кругу лиц, изучающих современный английский язык и пользующихся в своей работе литературой указанной тематики.
Составитель: д.п.н., профессор Искандарова О.Ю., кафедра
Иностранных языков
Рецензенты: д.т.н.,профессор Матвеев Ю.А.,
к.п.н, доцент Чуксина О.В., кафедра иностранных языков;
УДКкккк
ББКкккк
ISBN © О.Ю.Искандарова, 2011
Contents
Part I:
Introduction. History of Computers....................................................... 4
Unit 1:
Computer architecture............................................................................. 9
Unit 2:
Graphics processing unit........................................................................... 15
Unit 3:
Computer display....................................................................................... 25
Unit 4:
Mouse (computing)................................................................................... 33
Unit 5:
Copmuter keyboard................................................................................... 48
Unit 6:
Hard disk.................................................................................................... 55
Unit 7:
Random access memory............................................................................. 75
Part II:
Unit 8:
Operating system....................................................................................... 84
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Unit 9:
Windows Vista........................................................................................... 101
Unit 10:
Microsoft Office 2007................................................................................ 112
Norton 360.................................................................................................. 114
Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended (Beta).................................................. 116
Приложение.............................................................................................. 121
Работа над аннотацией........................................................................... 121
Терминологический словарь...................................................................127
Литература................................................................................................ 134
Introduction
History of Computers
The first electronic digital computer was called "ENIAC" built in 1945 in Philadelphia. It used so much electricity that lights in the nearby town dimmed every time it was used! What a long way we have come in a half-century, with personal computers in homes, offices, and schoolrooms across the world.
Many different computer companies appeared and began developing their own microprocessors and microcomputers. Companies such as Apple, Compaq, and Commodore started during this period o: confusion. At the conclusion of the timeline is the first: home personal computer or PC, by IBM in 1981. Computers began to steadily and rapidly increase in speed and power becoming more compact and more user friendly from the early 1980's on. The progress, however came in many small steps, rather than fewer major like earlier years. From the start of the decade to today, PCs in the home have become immensely popular. Computers have increased their role from professional and business machines to entertainment and educational tools. Telecommunications advancements such as the Internet have shown themselves to be useful both in education and business.
Hard disks or Computer hardware were invented in the 1950s. They started as large disks up to 20 inches in diameter holding just a few megabytes. They were originally called "fixed disks" or "Winchesters" (a code name used for popular IBM product). They later became known as "hard disks" to distinguis them from "floppy disks."
A typical desktop machine will have a hard disk with a capacity of between 10 and 40 gigabytes. Data is stored onto the disk in the form of files. A file is simply a named collection of bytes. The bytes might be the ASCII codes for the characters of a text file, or they could be the instructions of a software application for the computer to execute, or they could be the records of a data base, or they could be the pixel colors for a GIF image. No matter what it contains, however, a file is simply a string of bytes. When a program running on the computer requests a file, the hard disk retrieves its bytes and sends them to the CPU one at a time.
We have come a long way in computer technology since. The computer was viewed as a machine that was useful to big business and big government but not to the general public until the late 1970s. As technology advanced, this was changed by a distinctive group of engineers and entrepreneurs This was a very competitive time, and the only people who succeeded were the ones who were able to combine extraordinary engineering expertise with progressive business skills and an ability to foresee the needs of the future. Much of this activity was centered in the Silicon Valley in northern California where the first computer-related company had located in 1955. That company attracted thousands of related businesses, and the area became known as the technological capital of the world. Between 1981 and 1986, more than 1000 new technology-oriented businesses started there. At the busiest times, five or more, new companies started in a single week. The Silicon Valley attracted many risk-takers and gave them an opportunity to thrive in an atmosphere where creativity was expected and rewarded.
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Robert Noyce was a risk-taker who was successful both as an engineer and as an entrepreneur. The son of an Iowa minister, he was informal, genuine, and methodical. Even when he was running one of the most successful businesses in the Silicon Valley, he dressed informally and his office was an open cubicle that looked like everyone else's. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he started working for one of the first computer-related businesses in 1955. While working with these pioneers of computer engineering, he learned many things about computers and business management. As an engineer, he co-invented the integrated circuit, which was the basis for later computer design. This integrated circuit was less than an eighth of an inch square but had the same power as a transistor unit that was over 15 inches square or a vacuum tube Unit that was 6.5 feet square. As a businessman, Noyce co-founded Intel, one of the most successful companies in the Silicon Valley and the first company to introduce the microprocessor. The microprocessor chip became the heart of the computer, making it possible for a large computer system that once filled an entire room to be contained on a small chip that could be held in one's hand. The directors of Intel could not have anticipated the effects that the microprocessor would have on the world. It made possible the invention of the personal computer and eventually led to the birth of thousands of new businesses. Noyce's contributions to the development of the integrated circuit and the microprocessor earned him both wealth and fame before his death in 1990. In fact, many people consider his role to be one of the most significant in the Silicon Valley story.
The two men who first introduced the personal computer (PC) to the marketplace had backgrounds unlike Robert Noyce's. They had neither prestigious university education nor experience in big business. Twenty-year-old Steven Jobs and twenty-four-year-old Stephen Wozniak were college' drop-outs who had collaborated on their first project as computer hobbiests in a local computer club. Built in the garage of Jobs's parents, this first personal computer utilized the technology of Noyce's integrated circuit. It was typewriter-sized, as powerful as a much larger computer, and inexpensive to build. To Wozniak the new machine was a gadget to share with other members of their computer club. To Jobs, however, it was a product with great marketing potential for homes and small businesses. To raise the $1300 needed to fill their first orders Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak sold his scientific calculator. Wozniak built and delivered the first order of 100 computers in ten days. Lacking funds, he was forced to use the least expensive materials, the fewest chips, and the most creative arrangement of components. Jobs and Wozniak soon had more orders than they could fill with their makeshift production line.
Jobs and Wozniak brought different abilities to their venture: Wozniak was the technological wizard, and Jobs was the entrepreneur. Wozniak designed the first model, and Jobs devised its applications and attracted interest from investors and buyers. Wozniak once admitted that without Jobs he would never have considered selling the computer or known how to do it.
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From the very beginning, Apple Computer had been sensitive to the needs of a general public. Jobs insisted that the computers be light, trim, and made in muted colors. He also insisted that the language used with the computers be "user-friendly" and that the operation be simple enough for the average person to learn in a few minutes. Jobs also introduced the idea of donating Apple Computers to thousands of California schools, thereby indirectly introducing his product into the homes of millions of students. Their second model, the Apple II, was the state-of-the-art PC in home and small business computers from 1977 to 1982. By 1983 the total company sales were almost $600 million, and it controlled 23 percent of the worldwide market in personal computers.
As the computer industry began to reach into homes and small businesses around the world, the need for many new products for the personal computer began to emerge. Martin Alpert, the founder of Tecmar, Inc., was one of the first people to foresee this need. When IBM released its first personal computer in 1981, Alpert bought the first two models. He took them apart and worked to find out how other products could be attached to them. After two weeks, he emerged with the first computer peripherals for the IBM PC, and he later became one of the most successful creators of personal computer peripherals, he designed memory extenders that enabled the computer to store more information, and insert able boards that allowed to use different keyboards while sharing the same printer. After 1981, Tecmar produced an average of one new product per week.
Alpert had neither the technical training of Noyce nor the computer clubs of Jobs and Wozniak to encourage his interest in computer engineering. Throughout medical school he studied electronics passionately but privately. He became a doctor, but practiced only part time while pursuing his preferred interest in electronics. His first electronics products were medical. It wasn't until 1983 that Alpert stopped practicing medicine and gave his full attention to Tecmar. By 1984 Tecmar was valued at $150 million. Computer technology has opened a variety of opportunities for people who are creative risk-takers. Those who have been successful have been alert technologically, creatively, and financially. They have known when to use the help of other people and when to work alone.
Unit 1. Computer architecture
Task I. Key vocabulary.
Find the Russian equivalents of the following words and word combinations:
Hardware, firmware, bus, assembler, kernel, operating system, application, computer engineering, computer architecture, central processing unit, access, programmer, instruction set, memory address mode, processor register, to interconnect, hierarchy implementation, circuit Implementation, cost, performance, power consumption, rendering device, game console, efficient, display, lower-end chip, support, to reduce, host processor, high-end GPU, high-end graphics board, computer workstation, frame buffer controller, digital signal processor, flexible, to include, to feature, to recognize, offloading, to transfer, to handle, vendor, surpassed, to grow in popularity, essentially, previous, dedicated, currently released, computational, upgraded, motherboard, to refer, slot, solution, dedicated graphics solution, a trade-off, bandwidth, depending on, share memory, amount, latency, conventional, to yield results.
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Task II.
1) Read texts to comprehend its subject matter and to note the terminological words and word combinations.
2) Look through texts below to copy out sentences containing the main idea of the texts.
3) Make use of these key words and sentences to compile a short topic to be presented to your classmates at the classroom.
4) After this, try to make common Abstract (orally or in writing).
A typical vision of a computer architecture as a series of abstraction layers: hardware, firmware, assembler, kernel, operating system and applications.
In computer engineering, computer architecture is the conceptual design and fundamental operational structure of a computer system. It is a blueprint and functional description of requirements (especially speeds and interconnections) and design implementations for the various parts of a computer — focusing largely on the way by which the central processing unit (CPU) performs internally and accesses addresses in memory. It may also be defined as the science and art of selecting and interconnecting hardware components to create computers that meet functional, performance and cost goals. Computer architecture comprises at least three main subcategories
Instruction set architecture, or ISA, is the abstract image of a computing system that is seen by a machine language (or assembly language) programmer, including the instruction set, memory address modes, processor registers, and address and data formats.
— Microarchitecture, also known as Computer organization is a lower level, more concrete, description of the system that involves how the constituent parts of the system are interconnected and how they interoperate in order to implement the ISA. The size of a computer's cache for instance, is an organizational issue that generally has nothing to do with the ISA.
— System Design which includes all of the other hardware components within a computing system such as:
- system interconnects such as computer buses and switches
- memory controllers and hierarchies
- CPU off-load mechanisms such as direct memory access
- issues like multi-processing.
Once both ISA and microarchitecture has been specified, the actual device needs to be designed into hardware. This design process is often called implementation. Implementation is usually not considered architectural definition, but rather hardware design engineering.
Implementation can be further broken down into three pieces:
Logic Implementation/Design - where the blocks that were defined in the microarchitecture are implemented as logic equations.
· Circuit Implementation/Design - where speed critical blocks or logic equations or logic gates are implemented at the transistor level.
· Physical Implementation/Design - where the circuits are drawn out, the different circuit components are placed in a chip floor-plan or on a board and the wires connecting them are routed.
For CPUs, the entire implementation process is often called CPU design. More specific usages of the term include more general wider-scale hardware architectures, such as cluster computing and Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) architectures.
The most common goals in computer architecture revolve around the tradeoffs between cost and performance (i.e. speed), although other considerations, such as size, weight, reliability, feature set, expandability and power consumption, may be factors as well.
Generally cost is held constant, determined by either system or commercial requirements. Computer performance is often described in terms of clock speed (usually in MHz or GHz). This refers to the cycles per second of the main clock of the CPU. However, this metric is somewhat misleading, as a machine with a higher clock rate may not necessarily have higher performance. As a result manufacturers have moved away from clock speed as a measure of performance. Computer performance can also be measured with the amount of cache a processor contains. If the speed, MHz or GHz, were to be a car then the cache is the traffic light. No matter how fast the car goes it still will not hit that green traffic light. The more speed you have and the more cache you have the faster your processor is.
Modern CPUs can execute multiple instructions per clock cycle, which dramatically speeds up a program. Other factors influence speed, such as the mix of functional units, bus speeds, available memory, and the type and order of instructions in the programs being run.
There are two main types of speed, latency and throughput. Latency is the time between the start of a process and its completion. Throughput is the amount of work done per unit time. Interrupt latency is the guaranteed maximum response time of the system to an electronic event (e.g. when the disk drive finishes moving some data). Performance is affected by a very wide range of design choices — for example, adding cache usually makes latency worse (slower) but makes throughput better. Computers that control machinery usually need low interrupt latencies. These computers operate in a real-time environment and fail if an operation is not completed in a specified amount of time. For example, computer-controlled anti-lock brakes must begin braking almost immediately after they have been instructed to brake.
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The performance of a computer can be measured using other metrics, depending upon its application domain. A system may be CPU bound (as in numerical calculation), I/O bound (as in a web serving application) or memory bound (as in video editing). Power consumption has become important in servers and portable devices like laptops.
Benchmarking tries to take all these factors into account by measuring the time a computer takes to run through a series of test programs. Although benchmarking shows strengths, it may not help one to choose a computer. Often the measured machines split on different measures. For example, one system might handle scientific applications quickly, while another might play popular video games more smoothly. Furthermore, designers have been known to add special features to their products, whether in hardware or software, which permit a specific benchmark to execute quickly but which do not offer similar advantages to other, more general tasks.
The general scheme of optimization is to find the costs of the different parts of the computer. In a balanced computer system, the data rate will be constant for all parts of the system, and cost will be allocated proportionally to assure this. The exact form of the computer system will depend on the constraints and goals for which it was optimized.
Power consumption is another design criteria that factors in the design of modern computers. Power efficiency can often be traded for performance or cost benefits. With the increasing power density of modern circuits as the number of transistors per chip scales (Moore's Law), power efficiency has increased in importance. Recent processor designs such as the Intel Core 2 put more emphasis on increasing power efficiency. Also, in the world of embedded computing, power efficiency has long been and remains the primary design goal next to performance.
Assignments
Task III. Give Russian equivalents of the following computer word combinations with nouns used as modifiers:
assembly language, processor registers, computer organization, memory controllers, CPU off-load mechanisms, direct memory access, design engineering, circuit implementation/design, Physical implementation/design, cluster computing general wider-scale hardware architectures, non-uniform memory access (NUMA) architectures, computer performance, execute multiple instructions, interrupt latency, Instruction set, digital signal processor, high-speed general-purpose processor, share memory, logic implementation design, order instruction
memory address modes, power consumption; data formats; primary design goals
Task IV. Answer the following questions:
1. What can you tell about computer architecture in computer engineering?
2. What design process is called implementation?
3. What other factors are considered in computer architecture in tradeoffs?
4. How is computer performance described?
5. What modern CPUs can execute?
6. How can the performance of a computer be measured?
7. Do we take power consumption into consideration?
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