PROF. DANIEL ERNST
FEBRUARY 28
T H
, 2011
COMPUTER HARDWARE
CS 146
The Big Picture in
Computer Science
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
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.
—
Bell Telephone Laboratories
—
Technical
Memorandum (May 28, 1948)
Integrated Circuit
: Miniaturized electronic circuit
manufactured in a thin layer of
semiconductor
material.
4
Moore’s Law
5
Moore’s Law
6
The Power of Miniaturization
EDSAC 1 (1949)
~ 500 OPs
Pentium 4 (2002)
~ 12 GFLOPs
24,000,000 times faster
7
A picture is worth 1000 words…
(or a billion transistors)
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
Levels of Abstraction in a Computer System
Apps
O/S
Arch
m
Arch
Logic
Digital
Analog
Devices
Physics
software
hardware
Applications
–
Generic Software
Operating System
–
Controlling Software
Architecture
–
HW/SW Interface
m
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.
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