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 ...
AMD's Phenom Processor
Since 2005 AMD has used the Athlon name for their processors. This changed in 2007 when they released their new processor called Phenom. So we must ask the question; what is the difference between the Athlon and the Phenom? 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 ...
The AMD Athlon 64 Processor
AMD's Athlon 64 processor, released in September 2003, was their first 64-bit processor targeted for the workstation market to compete with Intel's Pentium 4. AMD's first 64-bit processor was the Opteron, released earlier in April that same year, targeted for the server market to compete with Intel's Xeon processor. 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 Fetch, Decode, Execute Cycle
The Fetch, Decode, Execute cycle is paramount to the functioning of a microprocessor. In this article I'll describe the Fetch, Decode, Execute cycle simplified to its bare-bones in a highly simplified fictitious microprocessor. 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 ...
The Microcontroller Memory Map
a microcontroller is a set of resources. Each resource is identified by one or more addresses in an address space. The memory map is a graphic representation of how the resources are associated with addresses. 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 ...
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 ...
Capacitors in AC Circuits
In an AC circuit capacitors exhibit a property similar to resistance called reactance and cause a phase shift between votage and current. The vector sum of resistance and reactance in an AC circuit is called impedance. More ...
Operating System Process Management
A program is not a process. A program is a file containing a list of instructions stored on disk. A process is an active entity with a program counter specifying the next instruction to execute and a set of resources. A program becomes a process when an executable file is loaded into memory. More ...
