PPTX - Department of Computer Science

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.