Direct Memory Access (DMA)
In early computers, all data transfers required the processor to read and write single words from memory until the entire transfer is complete. With DMA, the DMA controller takes control of the system buses to move data between the device and main memory. 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 ...
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 ...
Digital Logic Semiconductor Families
logic family refers to the way the semiconductors are designed to create gates. The first highly popular logic family, available in 1964, was TTL (Transistor-Transistor Logic). More ...
AMD's Phenom Processor
AMD released the first Phenom processor in 2007. Unlike Intel's Core 2 Quad processors, which are a multi-chip module (MCM) design, AMD's Phenom processors had all cores on the same silicon die. More ...
Operating System Memory Paging - Page Table Structure
One method of memory management is to break physical memory into fixed size blocks and break logical memory into same sized blocks called pages. The physical location of pages is tracked by a page table. More ...
Basic Decoder Circuitry
A microprocessors is a circuit that reads and execute program instructions called opcodes. A decoder is a circuit that converts an opcode into signals tused to control the circuitry of the microprocessor to enable it to perform the instruction. More ...
Operating System Processes
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. 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 Memory Paging Hardware Support
Paging is a memory management scheme that involves breaking physical memory into fixed-sized blocks and breaking logical memory into blocks of the same size called pages. When a process is to be executed, its pages are loaded into any available memory blocks. More ...
First-Come, First-Served CPU Scheduling Algorithm
CPU Scheduling deals with the problem of deciding which of the processes in the ready queue is to be alocated the CPU. There are many different CPU scheduling algorithms. In this article we describe first-come, first-served scheduling. More ...
Operating System Process Scheduling Queues
The objective of multiprogramming is to have some process running at all times, to maximize CPU utilization. To meet these objectives, the process scheduler selects a process from a queue for execution on the CPU. More ...
