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Tag Archives: Bus
32bit Vs 64bit
Well it looks like Samsung want to copy Apple down the 64bit route. This article pretty much covers the same ground we did in class and should help you get your head round 64 or 32 bit.
What bus would give you a word size of 64bit?
Control Bus
Well we have looked at the uses of the data and address buses, but as some of you have noticed I have not talked about the control bus. For those that were at the open days it might be worth while looking through the blog at older entries.
The control bus is different from the other two buses in being a group of discrete wires with separate functions.
- Read – signals a memory read operation is to take place
- Write – signals a memory write operation is to take place
- Clock – synchronises the signals being passed in and out of the processor
- Reset – clears all registers and buses of data
- Interrupt – tells the processor to save current process, run interrupt process until completed, then resume its activities (can be ignored)
- Non Maskable Interrupt (NMI) – tells the processor to save current process, run interrupt process until completed, then resume its activities (cannot be ignored)
So as you can see these functions are all separate but are controls and are therefore grouped into the control bus.
Network Revision
I thought it was worth while spending a little bit of time looking over the topic 5 networking section before moving on to topic 6 “using networks”.
The slides I used in class are after the break.
Contemporary communications
- buses
- With better fabrication processes we are able to put more transistors and tracks on a smaller space and are therefore increasing both the word size and available storage capacity in processors.
- Compression has allowed us to reduce the size of the data getting sent over serial buses, which has in turn reduced transmission times.
- wireless standards
- Bluetooth and WiFi have came a long way since they were introduced and are much available than they were only a few years ago. The adoption of these standards has allowed a new range of connected devices and these have increased the uptake of multimedia.
- increasing bandwidth
- It wasn’t that long ago homes had 14,000bps connection to the Internet, broadband and optical fibre has increased the amount of bandwidth homes and business have. This has in turn increased demand for large files like video and high quality images.
- USB
- USB has went from 1.5Mbps to 5Gbps in 12 years. This standard interface is by far the most popular wired connection type on computers. It allows the computer to be attached to large range of peripherals, some useful and some not so much.
- Firewire
- or ieee 1394 as it is known on non Apple devices, supports speeds up to 3.2Gbps and is mostly used to connect storage devices. Apple is phasing this out favour of Intel’s new thunderbolt standard.
Help for Computer Systems
I must confess, I’m not sure where I got these notes from. Its a list of Comparision tables that compare the main elements of the computer systems unit. It’s very useful for the questions that ask for the relative advantages and disadvantages of key technologies.
