Microcontrollers
A microcontroller is an IC that contains a microprocessor as well as RAM, ROM and general I/O ports. Engineers design microcontrollers into specific-purpose devices such as microwave ovens, cars, washing machines, refridgerators, and even space probes. More ...
Monolithic Kernel vs Microkernel vs Hybrid Kernel
An operating system consists of two parts, the kernel space which operates in privileged mode, and the user space which operates in unprivileged mode. More ...
Computer Video Display
If you view a computer as an input-processing-output machine, you can use a keyboard or removable storage device as the input, a program as the processing, but what can you use to retrieve the output? One way to acquire the output, be it text or graphics, is with a video display. More ...
Operating System Memory Allocation Methods
Operating System Memory Allocation is the process of assigning blocks of main memory to various running processes and to move processes back and forward between the main memory and disk. More ...
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 ...
Logical Versus Physical Memory Addresses
Computers use logical and physical addresses to access memory locatiuons. The CPU generates logical addresses. At run-time the Memory Management Unit (MMU) maps logical addresses to physical addresses. More ...
Operating System File Management
The operating system abstracts from the physical properties of its storage devices to define a logical storage unit, the file. The operating system maps files onto physical media and accesses these files via the storage devices. More ...
CPU Cache Basics
After the processor accesses a location in memory, there's a high probability that the next location in memory that it will access is in the same area of memory. So to make the computer run faster, a a smaller, faster memory called a cache is placed between main memory and the processor. 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 ...
The Computer's Chipset
A computers memory and peripheral ports connect through two highly integrated chips called simply the chipset. The chipset consists of a northbridge chip and a southbridge chip. More ...
Multithreaded Programming Process' and Threads
A process generally has a complete, set of private resources, each process has its own memory space. Threads exist within a process, every process has at least one. Threads share the process's resources, including memory and open files. More ...
Shortest-Job-First 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 shortest-job-first scheduling. More ...
