Test Your Understanding

  1. What are the four stages of CPU operation?

  2. What does an interrupt do?

  3. What is the width of CPUs for contemporary desktop computers?

  4. Why have clock speeds increased so rapidly since the microprocessor was invented?

  5. Why is pipelining important?

  6. What is distinctive about a superscalar processor?

  7. What is the difference between fetch/execute and load/store?

  8. What is the difference between RISC and CISC?

  9. What is the key reason for Moore's Law?

  10. What is the difference between VLIW and SIMD?

  11. What is the principal advantage of optical computing? What is the principal challenge to realizing it?

  12. What are examples of special purpose CPUs?

Get Essential Guide to Computing: The Story of Information Technology, The now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial