Introduction

Tom Kelliher, CS 240

Jan. 20, 1999

Announcements

Outline

1. Introduction.

2. Historical trends.

3. Under the covers.

4. The five parts of a computer.

Assignment

Read Chapter 1 and Sections 3.1--3.4.

Introduction

1. Syllabus.

2. How to do well:
   1. Stay ahead of the work.

   2. Read assigned sections before coming to class.

   3. Use the online material.

3. Tentative initial schedule sequence:
   1. Instruction sets and MIPS assembly.

   2. Arithmetic.

   3. Logic design.

   4. Datapath and control.

4. Unix & Spim.

5. Logic design.

Historical Trends

Today vs. 30 years ago:

1. Size. Computers in your car?

2. Power consumption and cooling.

3. Cost: CPU, memory, storage.

4. Computing power: ``safe'' passwords of a bygone era.

5. Networking.

Under the Covers

Consider a program:

1. What do we see?

2. What does the computer see?

3. Where does the translation take place?

Layers of a system:

1. Application software: word processing, etc.

2. System software: operating system (VM, virtual machines, filesystem, logical devices), compilers, assemblers, libraries, APIs, etc.

3. Hardware: instructions, registers, memory, physical devices.

4. The notion of abstraction.

The Five Parts of a Computer

1. Input.

2. Output.

3. Memory.

4. Control.

5. Datapath.

Some specific components:

1. CRT.

2. Mouse.

3. CPU: bus, L1 cache, control and branch, integer datapath (ALU and registers), floating point datapath.

4. DRAM. Volatile.

5. Disk. Non-volatile.

6. Ethernet, LANs, WANs.