Tuesday, 27 September 2011

The Rest of Computer Systems

Current Trends in Computer Hardware
Processor speeds are increasing
Clock speed is increasing
Increasing memory (Main memory and Backing Storage)
Data Transfer speeds increasing

4 measures to compare computer performance
Application Based Tests
involves benchmarking, getting computer systems to carry out the same tasks and measuring their performance, allows a fair comparison as it measures the performance of the whole computer system

Clock Speed
indicates the speed of the processor (Hertz!) gives an idea of how quickly the computer system executes instructions

MIPS - Millions of Instructions per second
not a fair method of comparison as computer systems have different instruction sets and carry out instrcutions in different ways

FLOPS - Floating Point Operations Per Second
measures how quikcly a computer can perform complex calcualations. these can be compared as the computer systems carry them out in the same method.

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