The AMD Athlon 64 X2 Processor
The Athlon 64 X2 is the first dual-core CPU manufactured by AMD.
It is essentially two Athlon 64 cores on one die joined together with additional control logic. The cores share one dual-channel memory controller. The benefit of dual-core processors is their ability to process more software threads at the same time. However, many programs are written with only one thread. More ...
Analog to Digital Convertion with a Microcontroller
Analog-to-digital conversion (or A/D conversion), is an electronic process that converts a continuously variable signal into a digital signal (expressed as a string of 1s and 0s). More ...
The Android Operating System
Android os is similar to Apple ios in that it is a layered stack of software that provides a rich set of frameworks for developing mobile applications. At the bottom of this software stack is the Linux kernal. More ...
Processor Affinity in Symmetric Multiprocessing
Processor Affinity refers to a process's tendency to continue running on the processor on which it is currently running. When a process executes on a CPU, that process's cache is populated with its most recently accessed data, if a process is moved to a different CPU, that second processor's cache must be populated with that data. More ...
Pentium P5 Processor
The Pentium P5 processor was introduced in 1993 was the first superscalar processor. It featured two integer pipelines and a pipelined floating-point unit. This article describes other innovations introduced in the P5. More ...
Integrated Circuit Design Flow
The process of integrated circuit design can be divided into stages: system design, logic design, circuit design, layout design, fabrication and testing. More ...
The Microcontroller Interrupt System
Events related to peripheral interfaces are asynchronous to the program running on the CPU. The interrupt mechanism allows an external event to temporarily put the normal execution of the microcontroller on hold and force the execution of a specific subroutine. More ...
Binary Number Representation and Binary Math
Computers perform all of their amazing work with only two voltage levels, one representing binary 0, the other representing binary 1. This article describes how to perform binary addition and subtraction. More ...
Intel's Dual-Core Core i3 Processor
Core i3 is an entry-level 2-core processor using the 32nm Westmere micro-architecture. With a Thermal Design Power (TDP) of 73 watts, the i3-530 is a cool-running chip that doesn't gobble loads of electricity, so those looking for a power-efficient, quiet machine will be happy with it. More ...
Virtual Memory and Memory Paging
In the early days of computers, memory chips were small capacity, scarce, and expensive. Because of this a memory management scheme called paging was invented. More ...
CPU Process Memory Address Binding
For a program to run on a CPU it must be brought from files in long-term, non-volatile storage to main memory. Addresses in the source program must be mapped to addresses in main memory. More ...
Introduction to Computer System Main Memory Operation
The CPU can be shared by a set of processes. Using CPU scheduling, we can improve the utilization of the CPU and the speed of the computer's response. To realize this increase in performance, multiple processes must be kept in memory. More ...