Stored Program Architecture
Almost every computer system ever made is based on the stored program architecture designed in 1945 design by the mathematician John Von Neumann. He described a system where data and instructions would be stored in memory. More ...
CPU Chip Packaging
Over the development time of the computer, several different designs of packaging for the CPU chip die have been used. Each type of packaging has its advantages and disadvantages. This article reviews some common packages that might still be in use. More ...
ARM Cortex-A72 Registers
16 registers r0 - r15 are accessable in the ARM Cortex-A72 user mode. In addition part of the CPSR (Current Program Status Register) is accessable. That part is the APSR (Application Program Status Register) which contains conditional status bits. 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 ...
Operating System Services
An operating system provides an environment for the execution of programs. It provides certain services to programs and to the users of those programs. These operating system services are provided for the convenience of the programmer, to make the programming task easier. More ...
Learn Assembly Language Programming on Raspberry Pi 400
One of the easiest ways to learn assembly language programming is on the Raspberry Pi 400. The Raspberry Pi 400 is a complete personal computer built into a compact keyboard. More ...
Intel's Core 2 Processors
Intel's Core 2 processors, released in July of 2006, are based on the Core microarchitecture, a dual core design using a 65nm manufacturing process to put 291 million transistors on a 143 square mm die. Each core has its own 64KB L1 cache. The two cores share an L2 cache that can be either 2MB or 4MB. More ...
Online Color Coded Resistor Calculator
To determine the resistance value of a color-coded resistor, select the colors matching each band from the drop-down lists. More ...
Operating System Process Control Block
An Operating System Process is a program in execution. It includes the value in the program counter and in the processors registers. A process also includes a stack, data section, and a heap. Although two processes may be associated with the same program, they are considered two separate execution sequences. More ...
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 ...
Operating System Memory Protection in a Paged Environment
Memory protection in a paged environment is accomplished by protection bits associated with each frame. For example read-write, read-only or execute-only bit, and valid-invalid bit. Normally, these bits are kept in the page table. More ...
Multicore Programming
A recent trend in system design is to place multiple computing cores on a single chip. Each core appears as a separate processor to the operating system. We call these multicore or multiprocessor systems. More ...